The dominant origin of diffuse Ly$α$ halos around LAEs explored by SED fitting and clustering analysis

Abstract

The physical origin of diffuse Ly$α$ halos (LAHs) around star-forming galaxies is still a matter of debate. We present the dependence of LAH luminosity ($L({\rm Ly}α)_H$) on the stellar mass ($M_\star$), $SFR$, color excess ($E(B-V)_\star$), and dark matter halo mass ($M_{\rm h}$) of the parent galaxy for $\sim 900$ Ly$α$ emitters (LAEs) at $z\sim2$ divided into ten subsamples. We calculate $L({\rm Ly}α)_H$ using the stacked observational relation between $L({\rm Ly}α)_H$ and central Ly$α$ luminosity by Momose et al. (2016), which we find agrees with the average trend of VLT/MUSE-detected individual LAEs. We find that our LAEs have relatively high $L({\rm Ly}α)_H$ despite low $M_\star$ and $M_{\rm h}$, and that $L({\rm Ly}α)_H$ remains almost unchanged with $M_\star$ and perhaps with $M_{\rm h}$. These results are incompatible with the cold stream (cooling radiation) scenario and the satellite-galaxy star-formation scenario, because the former predicts fainter $L({\rm Ly}α)_H$ and both predict steeper $L({\rm Ly}α)_H$ vs. $M_\star$ slopes. We argue that LAHs are mainly caused by Ly$α$ photons escaping from the main body and then scattered in the circum-galactic medium. This argument is supported by LAH observations of H$α$ emitters (HAEs). When LAHs are taken into account, the Ly$α$ escape fractions of our LAEs are about ten times higher than those of HAEs with similar $M_\star$ or $E(B-V)_\star$, which may partly arise from lower HI gas masses implied from lower $M_{\rm h}$ at fixed $M_\star$, or from another Ly$α$ source in the central part.