2009/11/18 by Anne-Marie Weijmans, A. Weijmans, R. G. Bower +5 · 36 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics #Emission spectrum #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Halo #Outflow #Physics #Spectral line #Spectrograph #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.16055.x
published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 402(4), 2245-2252 (Oxford University Press) · 9 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS
arxiv created 2009/11/18 · openalex publication_date 2009/12/18 · arxiv updated 2015/05/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We report observations of Lyman alpha blob 1 (LAB1) in the SSA 22 protocluster region (z= 3.09) with the integral-field spectrograph SAURON. We increased the signal-to-noise ratio in the spectra by more than a factor of 3 compared to our previous observations. This allows us to probe the structure of the LAB system in detail, examining its structure in the spatial and wavelength dimensions. We find that the emission from the system comes largely from five distinct blobs. Two of the emission regions are associated with Lyman break galaxies, while a third appears to be associated with a heavily obscured submillimeter galaxy. The fourth and fifth components do not appear to be associated with any galaxy despite the deep imaging that is available in this field. If we interpret wavelength shifts in the line centroid as velocity structure in the underlying gas, many of these emission systems show evidence of velocity shear. It remains difficult to distinguish between an underlying rotation of the gas and an outflow driven by the central object. We have examined all of the line profiles for evidence of strong absorption features. While several systems are better fitted by the inclusion of a weak absorption component, we do not see evidence for a large-scale coherent absorption feature such as that seen in LAB2.