Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21730903r&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #217, #309.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
We present evidence for spatially extended low surface brightness emission around Lyman break galaxies (LBGs), suggesting the presence of in situ star formation in gas associated with LBGs. We measure the emission in the V-band image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, corresponding to the z 3 rest-frame FUV light which is a sensitive measure of Star Formation Rates (SFRs). The outskirts of z 3 LBGs are too faint to accurately measure emission individually, therefore we create a stacked image of 48 z 3 LBGs that are compact, symmetrical, and isolated. We develop a theoretical framework to connect this emission around LBGs to the expected emission from surrounding neutral HI gas at high redshift, i.e., damped Lyman alpha systems (DLAs), using the Kennicutt Schmidt (KS) relation. Under the hypothesis that the observed FUV emission in the outskirts of LBGs is from in situ star formation in atomic dominated gas, we find that the SFR efficiency in neutral atomic-dominated hydrogen gas at z 3 is between factors of 10 and 50 lower than predictions based on the local KS relation. We also find that the metals produced by the in situ star formation in the outskirts of LBGs yield metallicities comparable to those of DLAs. This is a possible solution to the 'Missing Metals' problem, as long as the high metallicity gas in the cores of LBGs does not significantly contaminate the DLAs. In addition, we find that the covering fraction of DLA gas is sufficient to explain the emission in the outskirts of LBGs, while the covering fraction of molecular gas is not adequate. Therefore, our results are consistent with the idea of gas in spatially extended DLAs encompassing compact LBGs that could be the fuel source for star formation in the LBGs.
Chen Haibin
Rafelski Marc
Wolfe Arthur
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