The broadening of Lyman-α forest absorption lines

Garzilli, A.; Theuns, T.; Schaye, J.

doi:10.1093/mnras/stv394

The broadening of Lyman-α forest absorption lines

Garzilli, A.; Theuns, T.; Schaye, J.

Authors

A. Garzilli

Professor Tom Theuns tom.theuns@durham.ac.uk
Professor

J. Schaye

Abstract

We provide an analytical description of the line broadening of H I absorbers in the Lyman-α forest resulting from Doppler broadening and Jeans smoothing. We demonstrate that our relation captures the dependence of the line width on column density for narrow lines in z ∼ 3 mock spectra remarkably well. Broad lines at a given column density arise when the underlying density structure is more complex, and such clustering is not captured by our model. Our understanding of the line broadening opens the way to a new method to characterize the thermal state of the intergalactic medium and to determine the sizes of the absorbing structures.

Citation

Garzilli, A., Theuns, T., & Schaye, J. (2015). The broadening of Lyman-α forest absorption lines. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 450(2), 1465-1476. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stv394

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Feb 20, 2015
Publication Date	Jun 21, 2015
Deposit Date	Feb 10, 2016
Publicly Available Date	Feb 19, 2016
Journal	Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Print ISSN	0035-8711
Electronic ISSN	1365-2966
Publisher	Royal Astronomical Society
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	450
Issue	2
Pages	1465-1476
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stv394
Keywords	Intergalactic medium, Quasars: absorption lines, Large-scale structure of Universe.

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This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2015 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.