Exploratory Study of Transverse Proximity Effect around BAL Quasars

TL;DR

This study investigates the anisotropic HI absorption around quasars, focusing on BAL quasars, to understand the influence of dust tori and outflows on the surrounding gas environment.

Contribution

It provides observational evidence of HI absorption around BAL quasars using close quasar pairs, exploring the role of outflows and dust tori in anisotropic environments.

Findings

Optically thick gas detected around two of 12 BAL quasars.

Mean HI absorption strength is approximately 1 Å.

Column densities around BAL quasars differ significantly from non-BAL quasars.

Abstract

We aim to find out the reason why there exists an anisotropic HI absorption around quasars; i.e., the environments around quasars are highly biased toward producing strong HI absorption in transverse direction while there exists a significant deficit of HI absorption within a few Mpc of quasars along line-of-sight. The most plausible explanation for this opposite trend is that the transverse direction is shadowed from the quasar UV radiation due to dust torus. However, a critical weakness of this idea is that we have no information on inclination angle of our sightline relative to the torus. In this study, we examine environments of quasars with broad absorption troughs in their spectra (i.e., BAL quasars) because it is widely believed that BAL troughs are observed if the central continuum is viewed from the side through their powerful outflows near the dust torus. With closely separated 12 projected quasar pairs at different redshift with separation angle of $\theta$$<$120$^{\prime\prime}$, we examine HI absorption at foreground BAL quasars in spectra of background quasars. We confirm there exist optically thick gas around two of 12 BAL quasars, and that the mean HI absorption strength is EW$_{\rm rest}$$\sim$1A. These are consistent to the past results around non-BAL quasars, although not statistically significant. However, the origins of optically thick HI absorbers around BAL and non-BAL quasars could be different since their column densities are different by $\sim$3 orders of magnitude. The larger sample would be required for narrowing down possible scenarios for the anisotropic HI absorption around quasars.