2025/12/18 by Galbiati, Marta, Tornotti, Davide, Fumagalli, Michele +2
#Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.16422
We investigate the connection between strong, blended Lyα absorption systems (SBLAs) and ≈1000 Lyα emitting galaxies (LAEs) at z\gtrsim3 in 28 quasar fields from the MUSE Analysis of Gas around Galaxies (MAGG) survey. Selecting SBLAs as spectral regions with transmitted flux -0.050.25. The correlation appears to also depend on the width of the spectral window used to identify SBLAs, with a larger window yielding a stronger signal. Our analysis confirms that SBLAs serve as probes of the CGM at the interface between the Lyα forest and the optically-thick Lyman limit systems. The significant dependence of the LAE-SBLA cross-correlation on the spectral binning used to select these absorbers motivates future tests of the current SBLA framework as a tracer of halos.