UV Absorption Line Ratios in Circumgalactic Medium at Low Redshift in Realistic Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulations

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution cosmological simulations to analyze UV absorption line ratios in the circumgalactic medium of low-redshift star-forming galaxies, finding good agreement with observations and highlighting the potential of improved measurements to test models.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison of simulated and observed UV line ratios, exploring nitrogen abundance variations and radiation field effects, to address observational discrepancies.

Findings

Simulations agree well with existing observational data on line ratios.

Varying nitrogen abundance models affect line ratio predictions.

Enhanced observational sensitivity can significantly constrain theoretical models.

Abstract

Utilizing high-resolution cosmological hydrodynamic simulations we investigate various ultra-violet absorption lines in the circumgalactic medium of star forming galaxies at low redshift, in hopes of checking and alleviating the claimed observational conundrum of the ratio of NV to OVI absorbers, among others. We find a satisfactory agreement between simulations and extant observational data with respect to the ratios of the following four line pairs examined, NV/OVI, SiIV/OVI, NIII/OVI and NII/OVI. For the pairs involving nitrogen lines, we examine two cases of nitrogen abundance, one with constant N/O ratio and the other with varying N/O ratio, with the latter motivated by theoretical considerations of two different synthetic sources of nitrogen that is empirically verified independently. Along a separate vector, for all line pairs, we examine two cases of radiation field, one with the Haardt-Madau background radiation field and the other with an additional local radiation field sourced by hot gas in the host galaxy. In all cases, two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests indicate excellent agreements. We find that the apparent agreements between simulations and observations will be strongly tested, if the bulk of current upper limits of various line ratios are turned into actual detections. We show that an increase in observational sensitivity by 0.2 dex will already start to significantly constrain the models.