Measuring the Characteristic Size of Lyman-Alpha Forest Clouds

Details Measuring the Characteristic Size of Lyman-Alpha Forest Clouds Measuring the Characteristic Size of Lyman-Alpha Forest Clouds

Jul 1995

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1995hst..prop.6100f&link_type=abstract

HST Proposal ID #6100

Physics

Hst Proposal Id #6100 Quasars

Scientific paper

We are obtaining FOS UV spectra {GO Program 5320} of three pairs of quasars with projected separations less than two arcminutes in order to constrain the sizes of Lyman-Alpha forest clouds. We anticipated that these observations would yield improved upper limits of 100 kpc and so were surprised when the spectra of the first pair, Q0107-025 A,B {z = 0.956, 0.952, separation 1.44 arcmin}, showed a large number of absorption lines common to both spectra. Assuming that these are Lyman-Alpha forest lines, the directly-measured lower limit on the sizes of the clouds at 0.32 <= z <= 0.90 is between 300 and 450 kpc {H_0=80, q_0=0.5}. This is an order of magnitude larger than the best published lower limit. Furthermore, the rms velocity difference between the absorption lines along the two lines of sight is only about 100 km/sec. These results challenge all current theoretical models for the absorbers. Perhaps even more exciting is the fact the there is a third bright quasar, LBQS 0107-0232 {z=0.728, B_J=18.4}, lying a few arcminutes away from the pair {separations 2.00 and 2.93 arcmin from Q0107-025 A,B}, which will allow us to sample scales from 300 kpc to nearly 1 Mpc. We are requesting time to make FOS observations of these three quasars in order to: {1} extend the wavelength coverage of the observations of Q0107-025A,B to contain the Lyman alpha emission line and {2} obtain spectra of the Lyman-Alpha forest in LBQS 0107-0232.

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