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arXiv · astro-ph/0408031

A Redshift z=5.4 Lyman alpha Emitting Galaxy with Linear Morphology in the GRAPES/UDF Field

Abstract

We have discovered an extended Lyman alpha plume associated with a compact source at redshift 5.4 in slitless spectroscopic data from the Grism ACS Program for Extragalactic Science (GRAPES) project. The spatial extent of the emission is about 6 x 1.5 kpc (1 x 0.25 arcsec). Combining our grism data and the broadband images from the Hubble UltraDeep Field (UDF) images, we find a Lyman alpha line flux of 2e-17 erg/cm2/s and surface brightness 7e-17 erg/cm2/s/arcsec2. The UDF images show diffuse continuum emission associated with the Lyman alpha plume (hereafter UDF 5225), with three embedded knots. The morphology of UDF 5225 is highly suggestive of a galaxy in assembly. It is moreover possible that the prominent Lyman alpha emission from this object is due to an active nucleus, and that we are seeing the simultaneous growth through accretion of a galaxy and its central black hole. Followup observations at higher spectral resolution could test this hypothesis.

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James E. Rhoads, Nino Panagia, Rogier A. Windhorst, Sangeeta Malhotra, Norbert Pirzkal, Chun Xu, Louis Gregory Strolger, Louis E. Bergeron, Emanuele Daddi, Henry C. Ferguson, Jonathan P. Gardner, Caryl Gronwall, Zoltan Haiman, Anton Koekemoer, Martin Kuemmel, Leonidas A. Moustakas, Anna Pasquali, Adam Riess, Sperello di Serego Alighieri, Massimo Stiavelli, Zlatan Tsvetanov, Joel Vernet, Jeremy Walsh, Haojing Yan. 2004-12-06. A Redshift z=5.4 Lyman alpha Emitting Galaxy with Linear Morphology in the GRAPES/UDF Field. https://doi.org/10.1086/427622

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