Beacons into the Cosmic Dark Ages: Boosted transmission of Ly$\alpha$ from UV bright galaxies at $z \gtrsim 7$

TL;DR

This study shows that UV bright galaxies in overdensities at high redshift have significantly higher Ly$ extalpha$ transmission through the IGM, aiding in probing the epoch of reionization despite their biased environments.

Contribution

The paper combines reionization simulations and empirical ISM models to demonstrate boosted Ly$ extalpha$ transmission in UV bright galaxies and assesses their effectiveness in measuring the neutral hydrogen fraction.

Findings

UV bright galaxies have >2x higher Ly$ extalpha$ transmission at z~7.

Boosted transmission increases with higher neutral fractions.

Ly$ extalpha$ observations of UV bright galaxies can accurately measure the global neutral hydrogen fraction.

Abstract

Recent detections of Lyman alpha (Ly$\alpha$) emission from $z>7.5$ galaxies were somewhat unexpected given a dearth of previous non-detections in this era when the intergalactic medium (IGM) is still highly neutral. But these detections were from UV bright galaxies, which preferentially live in overdensities which reionize early, and have significantly Doppler-shifted Ly$\alpha$ line profiles emerging from their interstellar media (ISM), making them less affected by the global IGM state. Using a combination of reionization simulations and empirical ISM models we show, as a result of these two effects, UV bright galaxies in overdensities have $>2\times$ higher transmission through the $z\sim7$ IGM than typical field galaxies, and this boosted transmission is enhanced as the neutral fraction increases. The boosted transmission is not sufficient to explain the observed high Ly$\alpha$ fraction of $M_\mathrm{UV} \lesssim -22$ galaxies (Stark et al. 2017), suggesting Ly$\alpha$ emitted by these galaxies must be stronger than expected due to enhanced production and/or selection effects. Despite the bias of UV bright galaxies to reside in overdensities we show Ly$\alpha$ observations of such galaxies can accurately measure the global neutral hydrogen fraction, particularly when Ly$\alpha$ from UV faint galaxies is extinguished, making them ideal candidates for spectroscopic follow-up into the cosmic Dark Ages.