Emulating extended Lyman-alpha haloes around star-forming galaxies

TL;DR

This paper develops a modeling framework and emulators to predict and analyze the surface brightness profiles of extended Ly$ extalpha$ emission around star-forming galaxies, enabling insights into the circumgalactic medium's properties.

Contribution

It introduces a novel emulator-based approach to efficiently model Ly$ extalpha$ surface brightness profiles from CGM gas properties and sources, with high accuracy after limited training.

Findings

Three types of CGM neutral gas distributions identified.

Emulators achieve ~20% accuracy in predicting Ly$ extalpha$ SB profiles.

Model parameters can be reasonably recovered from mock profiles.

Abstract

Extended Ly$\alpha$ emission is commonly observed around star-forming galaxies, opening a window for probing the neutral hydrogen gas in the circumgalactic medium (CGM). In this paper, we develop a prescription of spherically symmetric CGM gas properties and build emulators to model circularly-averaged surface brightness (SB) profiles of the extended Ly$\alpha$ emission. With CGM gas properties parametrized by the density, velocity, and temperature profiles, a self-shielding calculation is carried out to obtain the neutral gas distribution with ionizing photons from the ultraviolet (UV) background and star formation in the galaxy. Our calculation reveals three types of systems with distinct neutral gas distribution: non-shielded systems with the CGM being highly ionized across all radii, shielded systems with a neutral gas shell shielding the UV background, and transitional systems in between. Ly$\alpha$ SB profiles are obtained through Ly$\alpha$ radiative transfer (RT) simulations, performed for the CGM models with three kinds of Ly$\alpha$ sources: the star formation from central and satellite galaxies, and the recombination in the CGM. We build emulators to efficiently predict Ly$\alpha$ SB profiles for given model parameters and Ly$\alpha$ sources, based on Gaussian process regression. After being trained with only 180 RT simulations for each Ly$\alpha$ source, the emulators reach an overall accuracy at the level of $\sim 20$ per cent. By applying the emulators to fit mock Ly$\alpha$ SB profiles constructed from our model, we find a reasonable recovery of model parameters, indicating the potential of extracting physical information of the CGM and galaxies from the observed extended Ly$\alpha$ emission.