| 1. |
- Wisotzki, L., et al.
(författare)
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Nearly all the sky is covered by Lyman-alpha emission around high-redshift galaxies
- 2018
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Ingår i: Nature. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0028-0836 .- 1476-4687. ; 562:7726, s. 229-232
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Galaxies are surrounded by large reservoirs of gas, mostly hydrogen, that are fed by inflows from the intergalactic medium and by outflows from galactic winds. Absorption-line measurements along the lines of sight to bright and rare background quasars indicate that this circumgalactic medium extends far beyond the starlight seen in galaxies, but very little is known about its spatial distribution. The Lyman-alpha transition of atomic hydrogen at a wavelength of 121.6 nanometres is an important tracer of warm (about 104 kelvin) gas in and around galaxies, especially at cosmological redshifts greater than about 1.6 at which the spectral line becomes observable from the ground. Tracing cosmic hydrogen through its Lyman-a emission has been a long-standing goal of observational astrophysics(1-3), but the extremely low surface brightness of the spatially extended emission is a formidable obstacle. A new window into circumgalactic environments was recently opened by the discovery of ubiquitous extended Lyman-alpha emission from hydrogen around high-redshift galaxies(4,5). Such measurements were previously limited to especially favourable systems(6-8) or to the use of massive statistical averaging(9,10) because of the faintness of this emission. Here we report observations of low-surface-brightness Lyman-alpha emission surrounding faint galaxies at redshifts between 3 and 6. We find that the projected sky coverage approaches 100 per cent. The corresponding rate of incidence (the mean number of Lyman-alpha emitters penetrated by any arbitrary line of sight) is well above unity and similar to the incidence rate of high-column-density absorbers frequently detected in the spectra of distant quasars(11-14). This similarity suggests that most circumgalactic atomic hydrogen at these redshifts has now been detected in emission.
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| 2. |
- Schmidt, K. B., et al.
(författare)
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Three-Dimensional Optimal Spectral Extraction (TDOSE) from integral field spectroscopy
- 2019
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Ingår i: Astronomy and Astrophysics. - : EDP Sciences. - 0004-6361 .- 1432-0746. ; 628
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The amount of integral field spectrograph (IFS) data has grown considerably over the last few decades. The demand for tools to analyze such data is therefore bigger now than ever. We present a flexible Python tool for Three-Dimensional Optimal Spectral Extraction (TDOSE) from IFS data cubes. TDOSE works on any three-dimensional data cube and bases the spectral extractions on morphological reference image models. By default, these models are generated and composed of multiple multivariate Gaussian components, but can also be constructed with independent modeling tools and be provided as input to TDOSE. In each wavelength layer of the IFS data cube, TDOSE simultaneously optimizes all sources in the morphological model to minimize the difference between the scaled model components and the IFS data. The flux optimization produces individual data cubes containing the scaled three-dimensional source models. This allows the efficient de-blending of flux in both the spatial and spectral dimensions of the IFS data cubes, and extraction of the corresponding one-dimensional spectra. TDOSE implicitly requires an assumption about the two-dimensional light distribution. We describe how the flexibility of TDOSE can be used to mitigate and correct for deviations from the input distribution. Furthermore, we present an example of how the three-dimensional source models generated by TDOSE can be used to improve two-dimensional maps of physical parameters like velocity, metallicity, or star formation rate when flux contamination is a problem. By extracting TDOSE spectra of similar to 150 [OII] emitters from the MUSE-Wide survey we show that the median increase in line flux is similar to 5% when using multi-component models as opposed to single-component models. However, the increase in recovered line emission in individual cases can be as much as 50%. Comparing the TDOSE model-based extractions of the MUSE-Wide [OII] emitters with aperture spectra, the TDOSE spectra provides a median flux (S/N) increase of 9% (14%). Hence, TDOSE spectra optimize the S/N while still being able to recover the total emitted flux.
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