Lyman-alpha Emission From Cosmic Structure I: Fluorescence

TL;DR

This paper predicts fluorescent Lyman-alpha emission from cosmic structures using cosmological simulations, exploring detection prospects for UV background and quasar-induced fluorescence to study intergalactic medium conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a Monte Carlo radiative transfer method applied to cosmological simulations to predict Lyman-alpha fluorescence signatures from cosmic structures.

Findings

Detection of quasar-induced fluorescence feasible with 10-hour exposures around bright quasars.

UV background fluorescence detection requires hundreds of hours on current telescopes.

Predictions enable probing intergalactic medium conditions and quasar radiation properties.

Abstract

We present predictions for the fluorescent Lyman-alpha emission signature arising from photoionized, optically thick structures in Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamic (SPH) cosmological simulations of a Lambda-CDM universe using a Monte Carlo Lyman-alpha radiative transfer code. We calculate the expected Lyman-alpha image and 2-dimensional spectra for gas exposed to a uniform ultraviolet ionizing background as well as gas exposed additionally to the photoionizing radiation from a local quasar, after correcting for the self-shielding of hydrogen. As a test of our numerical methods and for application to current observations, we examine simplified analytic structures that are uniformly or anisotropically illuminated. We compare these results with recent observations. We discuss future observing campaigns on large telescopes and realistic strategies for detecting fluorescence owing to the ambient metagalactic ionization and in regions close to bright quasars. While it will take hundreds of hours on the current generation of telescopes to detect fluorescence caused by the ultraviolet background (UVB) alone, our calculations suggest that of order ten sources of quasar-induced fluorescent Lyman-alpha emission should be detectable after a 10 hour exposure in a 10 arcmin^2 field around a bright quasar. These observations will help probe the physical conditions in the densest regions of the intergalactic medium as well as the temporal light curves and isotropy of quasar radiation.