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With close pairs of quasars at different redshifts, a background quasar sightline can be used to study a foreground quasar's environment in absorption. We use a sample of 650 projected quasar pairs to study the H I Lyα absorption transverse to luminous, z ∼ 2 quasars at proper separations of 30 kpc < R ⊥ < 1 Mpc. In contrast to measurements along the line-of-sight, regions transverse to quasars exhibit enhanced H I Lyα absorption and a larger variance than the ambient intergalactic medium, with increasing absorption and variance toward smaller scales. Analysis of composite spectra reveals excess absorption characterized by a Lyα equivalent width profile W = 2.3 Å (R ⊥/100 kpc)-0.46. We also observe a high (≃ 60%) covering factor of strong, optically thick H I absorbers (H I column ) at separations R ⊥ < 200 kpc, which decreases to ∼20% at R ⊥ ≃ 1 Mpc, but still represents a significant excess over the cosmic average. This excess of optically thick absorption can be described by a quasar-absorber cross-correlation function ξQA(r) = (r/r 0)γ with a large correlation length (comoving) and . The H I absorption measured around quasars exceeds that of any previously studied population, consistent with quasars being hosted by massive dark matter halos M halo ≈ 1012.5 M⊙ at z ∼ 2.5. The environments of these massive halos are highly biased toward producing optically thick gas, and may even dominate the cosmic abundance of Lyman limit systems and hence the intergalactic opacity to ionizing photons at z ∼ 2.5. The anisotropic absorption around quasars implies the transverse direction is much less likely to be illuminated by ionizing radiation than the line-of-sight. © 2013. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved..

Quantitative morphologies, such as asymmetry and concentration, have long been used as an effective way to assess the distribution of galaxy starlight in large samples. Application of such quantitative indicators to other data products could provide a tool capable of capturing the 2-dimensional distribution of a range of galactic properties, such as stellar mass or star-formation rate maps. In this work, we utilize galaxies from the Illustris and IllustrisTNG simulations to assess the applicability of concentration and asymmetry indicators to the stellar mass distribution in galaxies. Specifically, we test whether the intrinsic values of concentration and asymmetry (measured directly from the simulation stellar mass particle maps) are recovered after the application of measurement uncertainty and a point spread function (PSF). We find that random noise has a non-negligible systematic effect on asymmetry that scales inversely with signal-to-noise, particularly at signal-to-noise less than 100. We evaluate different methods to correct for the noise contribution to asymmetry at very low signal-to-noise, where previous studies have been unable to explore due to systematics. We present algebraic corrections for noise and resolution to recover the intrinsic morphology parameters. Using Illustris as a comparison dataset, we evaluate the robustness of these fits in the presence of a different physics model, and confirm these correction methods can be applied to other datasets. Lastly, we provide estimations for the uncertainty on different correction methods at varying signal-to-noise and resolution regimes., STFC ERC

The origin of the star forming main sequence ( i.e., the relation between star formation rate and stellar mass, globally or on kpc-scales; hereafter SFMS) remains a hotly debated topic in galaxy evolution. Using the ALMA-MaNGA QUEnching and STar formation (ALMaQUEST) survey, we show that for star forming spaxels in the main sequence galaxies, the three local quantities, star-formation rate surface density (\sigsfr), stellar mass surface density (\sigsm), and the \h2~mass surface density (\sigh2), are strongly correlated with one another and form a 3D linear (in log) relation with dispersion. In addition to the two well known scaling relations, the resolved SFMS (\sigsfr~ vs. \sigsm) and the Schmidt-Kennicutt relation (\sigsfr~ vs. \sigh2; SK relation), there is a third scaling relation between \sigh2~ and \sigsm, which we refer to as the `molecular gas main sequence' (MGMS). The latter indicates that either the local gas mass traces the gravitational potential set by the local stellar mass or both quantities follow the underlying total mass distributions. The scatter of the resolved SFMS ($\sigma \sim 0.25$ dex) is the largest compared to those of the SK and MGMS relations ($\sigma \sim$ 0.2 dex). A Pearson correlation test also indicates that the SK and MGMS relations are more strongly correlated than the resolved SFMS. Our result suggests a scenario in which the resolved SFMS is the least physically fundamental and is the consequence of the combination of the SK and the MGMS relations.

Using a sample of ∼15 000 kpc-scale star-forming spaxels in 28 galaxies drawn from the ALMA-MaNGA QUEnching and STar formation (ALMaQUEST) survey, we investigate the galaxy-to-galaxy variation of the ‘resolved’ Schmidt–Kennicutt relation (rSK; $\Sigma _{\rm H_2}$–ΣSFR), the ‘resolved’ star-forming main sequence (rSFMS; Σ⋆–ΣSFR), and the ‘resolved’ molecular gas main sequence (rMGMS; Σ⋆–$\Sigma _{\rm H_2}$). The rSK relation, rSFMS, and rMGMS all show significant galaxy-to-galaxy variation in both shape and normalization, indicating that none of these relations is universal between galaxies. The rSFMS shows the largest galaxy-to-galaxy variation and the rMGMS the least. By defining an ‘offset’ from the average relations, we compute a ΔrSK, ΔrSFMS, ΔrMGMS for each galaxy, to investigate correlations with global properties. We find the following correlations with at least 2σ significance: The rSK is lower (i.e. lower star formation efficiency) in galaxies with higher M⋆, larger Sersic index, and lower specific SFR (sSFR); the rSFMS is lower (i.e. lower sSFR) in galaxies with higher M⋆ and larger Sersic index; and the rMGMS is lower (i.e. lower gas fraction) in galaxies with lower sSFR. In the ensemble of all 15 000 data points, the rSK relation and rMGMS show equally tight scatters and strong correlation coefficients, compared with a larger scatter and weaker correlation in the rSFMS. Moreover, whilst there is no correlation between ΔrSK and ΔrMGMS in the sample, the offset of a galaxy’s rSFMS does correlate with both of the other two offsets. Our results therefore indicate that the rSK and rMGMS are independent relations, whereas the rSFMS is a result of their combination.

We investigate the nature of the scaling relations between the surface density of star formation rate ($\Sigma _{\rm SFR}$), stellar mass ($\Sigma _*$), and molecular gas mass ($\Sigma _{\rm H_2}$), aiming at distinguishing between the relations that are primary, i.e. more fundamental, and those which are instead an indirect by-product of the other relations. We use the ALMaQUEST survey and analyse the data by using both partial correlations and Random Forest regression techniques. We unambiguously find that the strongest intrinsic correlation is between $\Sigma _{\rm SFR}$ and $\Sigma_{\rm H_2}$ (i.e. the resolved Schmidt-Kennicutt relation), followed by the correlation between $\Sigma _{\rm H_2}$ and $\Sigma _*$ (resolved Molecular Gas Main Sequence, rMGMS). Once these two correlations are taken into account, we find that there is no evidence for any intrinsic correlation between $\Sigma _{\rm SFR}$ and $\Sigma _*$, implying that SFR is entirely driven by the amount of molecular gas, while its dependence on stellar mass (i.e. the resolved Star Forming Main Sequence, rSFMS) simply emerges as a consequence of the relationship between molecular gas and stellar mass., Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS, 7 pages, 4 figures

Quantitative morphologies, such as asymmetry and concentration, have long been used as an effective way to assess the distribution of galaxy starlight in large samples. Application of such quantitative indicators to other data products could provide a tool capable of capturing the 2-dimensional distribution of a range of galactic properties, such as stellar mass or star-formation rate maps. In this work, we utilize galaxies from the Illustris and IllustrisTNG simulations to assess the applicability of concentration and asymmetry indicators to the stellar mass distribution in galaxies. Specifically, we test whether the intrinsic values of concentration and asymmetry (measured directly from the simulation stellar mass particle maps) are recovered after the application of measurement uncertainty and a point spread function (PSF). We find that random noise has a non-negligible systematic effect on asymmetry that scales inversely with signal-to-noise, particularly at signal-to-noise less than 100. We evaluate different methods to correct for the noise contribution to asymmetry at very low signal-to-noise, where previous studies have been unable to explore due to systematics. We present algebraic corrections for noise and resolution to recover the intrinsic morphology parameters. Using Illustris as a comparison dataset, we evaluate the robustness of these fits in the presence of a different physics model, and confirm these correction methods can be applied to other datasets. Lastly, we provide estimations for the uncertainty on different correction methods at varying signal-to-noise and resolution regimes., Comment: 19 pages, 18 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

The origin of the star forming main sequence ( i.e., the relation between star formation rate and stellar mass, globally or on kpc-scales; hereafter SFMS) remains a hotly debated topic in galaxy evolution. Using the ALMA-MaNGA QUEnching and STar formation (ALMaQUEST) survey, we show that for star forming spaxels in the main sequence galaxies, the three local quantities, star-formation rate surface density (\sigsfr), stellar mass surface density (\sigsm), and the \h2~mass surface density (\sigh2), are strongly correlated with one another and form a 3D linear (in log) relation with dispersion. In addition to the two well known scaling relations, the resolved SFMS (\sigsfr~ vs. \sigsm) and the Schmidt-Kennicutt relation (\sigsfr~ vs. \sigh2; SK relation), there is a third scaling relation between \sigh2~ and \sigsm, which we refer to as the `molecular gas main sequence' (MGMS). The latter indicates that either the local gas mass traces the gravitational potential set by the local stellar mass or both quantities follow the underlying total mass distributions. The scatter of the resolved SFMS ($\sigma \sim 0.25$ dex) is the largest compared to those of the SK and MGMS relations ($\sigma \sim$ 0.2 dex). A Pearson correlation test also indicates that the SK and MGMS relations are more strongly correlated than the resolved SFMS. Our result suggests a scenario in which the resolved SFMS is the least physically fundamental and is the consequence of the combination of the SK and the MGMS relations., Comment: 4 figures, 1 table, accepted by ApJL