MusE GAs FLOw and Wind (MEGAFLOW) III: galactic wind properties using background quasars

Ilane Schroetter (1, 2) , Nicolas F. Bouché (3, 1) , Johannes Zabl (1) , Thierry Contini (1) , Martin Wendt , Joop Schaye (4) , Peter Mitchell (5) , Sowgat Muzahid , Raffaella A Marino (6) , Roland Bacon (3) , Simon J Lilly , Johan Richard (3) , Lutz Wisotzki (7)

1 IRAP - Institut de recherche en astrophysique et planétologie
2 GEPI - Galaxies, Etoiles, Physique, Instrumentation
3 CRAL - Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon
4 Leiden Observatory [Leiden]
5 University of Melbourne
6 ETH Zürich - Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology [Zürich]
7 AIP - Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam

We present results from our ongoing MusE GAs FLOw and Wind (MEGAFLOW) survey, which consists of 22 quasar lines-of-sight, each observed with the integral field unit (IFU) MUSE and the UVES spectrograph at the ESO Very Large Telescopes (VLT). The goals of this survey are to study the properties of the circum-galactic medium around z ∼ 1 star-forming galaxies. The absorption-line selected survey consists of 79 strong Mg ii absorbers (with rest-frame equivalent width (REW) 0.3Å) and, currently, 86 associated galaxies within 100 projected kpc of the quasar with stellar masses (M) from 10 9 to 10 11 M. We find that the cool halo gas traced by Mg ii is not isotropically distributed around these galaxies from the strong bi-modal distribution in the azimuthal angle of the apparent location of the quasar with respect to the galaxy major-axis. This supports a scenario in which outflows are bi-conical in nature and co-exist with a coplanar gaseous structure extending at least up to 60 to 80 kpc. Assuming that absorbers near the minor axis probe outflows, the current MEGAFLOW sample allowed us to select 26 galaxy-quasar pairs suitable for studying winds. From this sample, using a simple geometrical model, we find that the outflow velocity only exceeds the escape velocity when M 4×10 9 M , implying the cool material is likely to fall back except in the smallest halos. Finally, we find that the mass loading factor η, the ratio between the ejected mass rate and the star formation rate (SFR), appears to be roughly constant with respect to the galaxy mass.

Domaines: Physique [physics]; Astrophysique [astro-ph]

Ilane Schroetter, Nicolas F. Bouché, Johannes Zabl, Thierry Contini, Martin Wendt, et al.. MusE GAs FLOw and Wind (MEGAFLOW) III: galactic wind properties using background quasars. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, 2019, ⟨10.1093/mnras/stz2822/5586576⟩. ⟨hal-02325516⟩