Back
Full-text
Journal article

MUSE Analysis of Gas around Galaxies (MAGG) – I: Survey design and the environment of a near pristine gas cloud at z ≈ 3.5

  • Lofthouse, Emma K ORCID Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Durham University, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK
  • Fumagalli, Michele ORCID Dipartimento di Fisica G. Occhialini, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Piazza della Scienza 3, I-20126 Milano, Italy
  • Fossati, Matteo ORCID Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Durham University, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK
  • O’Meara, John M W. M. Keck Observatory 65-1120 Mamalahoa Hwy, Kamuela, HI 96743, USA
  • Murphy, Michael T ORCID Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria 3122, Australia
  • Christensen, Lise ORCID DARK, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Lyngbyvej 2, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Prochaska, J Xavier Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA
  • Cantalupo, Sebastiano ORCID Department of Physics, ETH Zurich, Wolfgang-Pauli-Strasse 27, CH-8093 Zurich, Switzerland
  • Bielby, Richard M ORCID Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Durham University, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK
  • Cooke, Ryan J ORCID Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Durham University, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK
  • Lusso, Elisabeta ORCID Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Via Giovanni Sansone, I-50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy
  • Morris, Simon L Centre for Advanced Instrumentation, Durham University, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK
Show more…
  • 2019-11-4
Published in:
  • Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. - Oxford University Press (OUP). - 2019, vol. 491, no. 2, p. 2057-2074
Space and Planetary Science
Astronomy and Astrophysics
English ABSTRACT
We present the design, methods, and first results of the MUSE Analysis of Gas around Galaxies (MAGG) survey, a large programme on the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument at the Very Large Telescope (VLT), which targets 28 z > 3.2 quasars to investigate the connection between optically thick gas and galaxies at z ∼ 3–4. MAGG maps the environment of 52 strong absorption line systems at z ≳ 3, providing the first statistical sample of galaxies associated with gas-rich structures in the early Universe. In this paper, we study the galaxy population around a very metal poor gas cloud at z ≈ 3.53 towards the quasar J124957.23−015928.8. We detect three Lyα emitters within $\lesssim 200~\rm km~s^{-1}$ of the cloud redshift, at projected separations $\lesssim 185~\rm ~kpc$ (physical). The presence of star-forming galaxies near a very metal-poor cloud indicates that metal enrichment is still spatially inhomogeneous at this redshift. Based on its very low metallicity and the presence of nearby galaxies, we propose that the most likely scenario for this Lyman Limit System (LLS) is that it lies within a filament which may be accreting on to a nearby galaxy. Taken together with the small number of other LLSs studied with MUSE, the observations to date show a range of different environments near strong absorption systems. The full MAGG survey will significantly expand this sample and enable a statistical analysis of the link between gas and galaxies to pin down the origin of these diverse environments at z ≈ 3–4.
Language
  • English
Open access status
green
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/244594
Statistics
Document views: 22 File downloads:
  • fulltext.pdf: 0