The COS-legacy survey of C iv absorbers: properties and origins of the intervening systems.

We present here results from a survey of intervening C  iv absorbers at z < 0.16 conducted using 223 sightlines from the Hubble Spectroscopic Legacy Archive. Most systems (83%) out of the total sample of 69 have simple kinematics with 1 or 2 C  iv components. In the 22 C  iv systems with well constrained H  i column densities, the temperatures from the b -values imply predominantly photoionized plasma (T ≤ 10⁵ K) and non-thermal dynamics. These systems also have solar or higher metallicities. We obtain a C  iv line density of |$\mathrm{ d}\mathcal {N}/\mathrm{ d}X = 5.1\pm 1.0$| for |$\log [N(\rm {C}\, \rm {{iv}})~(\rm {cm}^{-2})]\ge 12.9$|⁠ , and |$\Omega _{\rm {C}\, \rm {\rm {iv}}}=(8.01\pm 1.62) \times 10^{-8}$| for |$12.9 \le \log [N(\rm {C}\, \rm {{iv}})~(\rm {cm}^{-2})] \le 15.0$|⁠. The C  iv bearing diffuse gas in the z < 0.16 Universe has a metallicity of (2.07  ±  0.43) ×  10⁻³ Z_⊙, an order of magnitude more than the metal abundances in the IGM at high redshifts (z ≳ 5), and consistent with the slow build-up of metals in the diffuse circum/intergalactic space with cosmic time. For z < 0.015 (complete above L > 0.01 L ^⋆), the Sloan Digital Sky Survey provides a tentative evidence of declining covering fraction for strong C  iv (N > 10^13.5 cm⁻²) with ρ (impact parameter) and ρ/ R _vir. However, the increase at high separations suggests that strong systems are not necessarily coincident with such galaxies. We also find that strong C  iv absorption at z < 0.051 is not coincident with galaxy overdense regions complete for L > 0.13 L ^⋆. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]