Physical conditions of five O vi absorption systems towards PG 1522+101.

Autor: Sankar, Sriram, Narayanan, Anand, Savage, Blair D, Khaire, Vikram, Rosenwasser, Benjamin E, Charlton, Jane, Wakker, Bart P
Předmět:
Zdroj: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society; 11/15/2020, Vol. 498 Issue 4, p4864-4886, 23p
Abstrakt: We present the analysis of five O  vi absorbers identified across a redshift path of z ∼ (0.6−1.3) towards the background quasar PG 1522+101 with information on five consecutive ionization stages of oxygen from O  ii to O  vi. The combined HST and Keck spectra cover UV, redshifted extreme-UV, and optical transitions from a multitude of ions spanning ionization energies in the range of ∼(13−300) eV. Low-ionization (C  ii , O  ii , Si  ii , Mg  ii) and very high-ionization species (Ne  viii , Mg  x) are non-detections in all the absorbers. Three of the absorbers have coverage of He  i , in one of which it is a >3σ detection. The kinematic structures of these absorbers are extracted from C  iv detected in HIRES spectra. The farthest absorber in our sample also contains the detections of Ne  v and Ne  vi. Assuming co-spatial absorbing components, the ionization models show the medium to be multiphased with small-scale density–temperature inhomogeneities that are sometimes kinematically unresolved. In two of the absorbers, there is an explicit indication of the presence of a warm gas phase (T ≳ 105 K) traced by O  vi. In the remaining absorbers, the column densities of the ions are consistent with a non-uniform photoionized medium. The subsolar [C/O] relative abundances inferred for the absorbers point at enrichment from massive Type II supernovae. Despite metal enrichment, the inferred wide range for [O/H] ∼ [−2.1, +0.2] amongst the absorbers along with their anticorrelation with the observed H  i suggest poor small-scale mixing of metals with hydrogen in the regions surrounding galaxies and the IGM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Databáze: Complementary Index