a New Size Constraint on Lyman Alpha Clouds: Cycle 4 Medium

Details a New Size Constraint on Lyman Alpha Clouds: Cycle 4 Medium a New Size Constraint on Lyman Alpha Clouds: Cycle 4 Medium

Jul 1994

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1994hst..prop.5320f&link_type=abstract

HST Proposal ID #5320

Physics

Hst Proposal Id #5320 Quasars And Agn Quasar Absorption

Scientific paper

Although they have been the target of extensive ground- and space-based investigations as well as intense theoretical modelling, the physical nature of the absorbing clouds responsible for the Lyman alpha forest of absorption seen shortward of 1215 A in the rest frame of all QSOs remains elusive. Optical and UV data have yielded column density, Doppler parameter, and redshift distributions, but the determination of gas density and ionization fractions requires a knowledge of the size of the absorber. Ground-based constraints derived from observations of gravitationally-lensed and projected pairs of QSOs allow for a wide range of sizes: 10 kpc < r < 1 Mpc. We propose to observe three relatively bright, intermediate-redshift pairs of QSOs, with separations on the sky of roughly an arcminute to search for common Lyman alpha forest lines in the redshift range from 0.35 to 1.7. Numerical simulations show that these observations will be sensitive to cloud sizes greater than about 100 kpc. If the characteristic size of the clouds is in the range from 100 kpc to 1 Mpc an estimate of the size will result from the fraction of absorption lines common along two nearby lines of sight. In the case of no common features, the upper limit on the size of the clouds will be reduced by more than a factor of 4.

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