How do galactic winds affect the Lyalpha forest?

Abstract

We investigate the effect of galactic winds on the Lyalpha forest in cosmological simulations of structure and galaxy formation. We combine high resolution N-body simulations of the evolution of the dark matter with a semi-analytic model for the formation and evolution of galaxies which includes detailed prescriptions for the long-term evolution of galactic winds. This model is the first to describe the evolution of outflows as a two-phase process (an adiabatic bubble followed by a momentum--driven shell) and to include metal--dependent cooling of the outflowing material. We find that the main statistical properties of the Lyalpha forest, namely the flux power spectrum P(k) and the flux probability distribution function (PDF), are not significantly affected by winds and so do not significantly constrain wind models. Winds around galaxies do, however, produce detectable signatures in the forest, in particular, increased flux transmissivity inside hot bubbles, and narrow, saturated absorption lines caused by dense cooled shells. We find that the Lyalpha flux transmissivity is highly enhanced near strongly wind-blowing galaxies, almost half of all high-redshift galaxies in our sample, in agreement with the results of Adelberger et al. (2005). Finally, we propose a new method to identify absorption lines potentially due to wind shells in the Lyalpha forest: we calculate the abundance of saturated regions in spectra as a function of region width and we find that the number with widths smaller than about 1 Angstrom at z=3 and 0.6 Angstrom at z=2 may be more than doubled. This should be detectable in real spectra.