Many New Sightlines for the Study of IGM Helium and He II Reionization, Using SDSS, GALEX, and HST

Details Many New Sightlines for the Study of IGM Helium and He II Reionization, Using SDSS, GALEX, and HST Many New Sightlines for the Study of IGM Helium and He II Reionization, Using SDSS, GALEX, and HST

Jan 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aas...21535802s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #215, #358.02; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.542

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The reionization of He II was a major event in the history of the intergalactic medium. One of the most sensitive direct measures of this process is the Gunn-Peterson test, examining absorption along quasar sightlines. However, because He II Ly-α occurs in the extreme-UV (rest-frame), intervening hydrogen absorption makes it very rare to find sightlines clean down to the He II Gunn-Peterson trough. Until recently, only about a half-dozen such sightlines were known. We have recently greatly expanded this sample by discovering at least 19 new clean He II sightlines. We exploited the large quasar sample of SDSS and the broadband UV imaging of GALEX to create a catalog of high-confidence far-UV-bright quasars, and then obtained far-UV HST spectra for 39 of these. We confirm 29 as far-UV-bright, and find 19 are clean down to He II Ly-α, thereby confirming the high efficiency of our approach, and providing many sightlines to study the evolution of the He II Gunn-Peterson opacity at a broad range of redshifts. Since these quasar spectra cover the largely unexplored rest-frame extreme-UV, they may also give us information about the quasars themselves. In addition, we present our catalog of nearly 600 far-UV-bright quasars at z>2.8.
We gratefully acknowledge the SDSS and SDSS-II collaborations, support from NASA/GALEX grants NNG05GE12G, NNG06GD03G, and NNX09AF91G, and NASA/STScI funding for HST program numbers 10907, 11215, and 11982.

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