Massive Warm/Hot Galaxy Coronae: II. Isentropic Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces an analytic model for the circumgalactic medium of Milky Way-like galaxies, reproducing observed ion absorption features and predicting properties of the warm/hot gas in galaxy halos.

Contribution

It presents a novel isentropic, hydrostatic, barotropic model incorporating magnetic and cosmic ray effects, matching multiple observational datasets of galaxy coronae.

Findings

Model reproduces OVII/OVIII and OVI observations.

Total gas mass inside CGM is approximately 5.5 x 10^{10} solar masses.

Cooling to dynamical times ratio is less than 4 at large radii.

Abstract

We construct a new analytic phenomenological model for the extended circumgalactic material (CGM) of $L^*$ galaxies. Our model reproduces the OVII/OVIII absorption observations of the Milky Way (MW) and the OVI measurements reported by the COS-Halos and eCGM surveys. The warm/hot gas is in hydrostatic equilibrium in a MW gravitational potential, and we adopt a barotropic equation of state, resulting in a temperature variation as a function of radius. A pressure component with an adiabatic index of $\gamma=4/3$ is included to approximate the effects of a magnetic field and cosmic rays. We introduce a metallicity gradient motivated by the enrichment of the inner CGM by the Galaxy. We then present our fiducial model for the corona, tuned to reproduce the observed OVI-OVIII column densities, and with a total mass of $M_{\rm gas} \approx 5.5 \times 10^{10}~{\rm M_{\odot}}$ inside $r_{\rm cgm} \approx 280$ kpc. The gas densities in the CGM are low ($n_{\rm H} = 10^{-5} - 3 \times 10^{-4}~{\rm cm^{-3}}$) and its collisional ionization state is modified by the metagalactic radiation field (MGRF). We show that for OVI-bearing warm/hot gas with typical observed column densities $N_{\rm OVI} \sim 3 \times 10^{14}~{\rm cm^{-2}}$ at large ($\gtrsim 100$ kpc) impact parameters from the central galaxies, the ratio of the cooling to dynamical times, $t_{\rm cool}/t_{\rm dyn}$, has a model-independent upper limit of $\lesssim 4$. In our model, $t_{\rm cool}/t_{\rm dyn}$ at large radii is $\sim 2-3$. We present predictions for a wide range of future observations of the warm/hot CGM, from UV/X-ray absorption and emission spectroscopy, to dispersion measure (DM) and Sunyaev-Zeldovich CMB measurements. We provide the model outputs in machine-readable data files, for easy comparison and analysis.