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Galaxies are surrounded by large reservoirs of gas, mostly hydrogen, that are fed by inflows from the intergalactic medium and by outflows from galactic winds. Absorption-line measurements along the lines of sight to bright and rare background quasars indicate that this circumgalactic medium extends far beyond the starlight seen in galaxies, but very little is known about its spatial distribution. The Lyman-alpha transition of atomic hydrogen at a wavelength of 121.6 nanometres is an important tracer of warm (about 104 kelvin) gas in and around galaxies, especially at cosmological redshifts greater than about 1.6 at which the spectral line becomes observable from the ground. Tracing cosmic hydrogen through its Lyman-a emission has been a long-standing goal of observational astrophysics(1-3), but the extremely low surface brightness of the spatially extended emission is a formidable obstacle. A new window into circumgalactic environments was recently opened by the discovery of ubiquitous extended Lyman-alpha emission from hydrogen around high-redshift galaxies(4,5). Such measurements were previously limited to especially favourable systems(6-8) or to the use of massive statistical averaging(9,10) because of the faintness of this emission. Here we report observations of low-surface-brightness Lyman-alpha emission surrounding faint galaxies at redshifts between 3 and 6. We find that the projected sky coverage approaches 100 per cent. The corresponding rate of incidence (the mean number of Lyman-alpha emitters penetrated by any arbitrary line of sight) is well above unity and similar to the incidence rate of high-column-density absorbers frequently detected in the spectra of distant quasars(11-14). This similarity suggests that most circumgalactic atomic hydrogen at these redshifts has now been detected in emission.
The He II transverse proximity effect-enhanced He II Ly alpha transmission in a background sightline caused by the ionizing radiation of a foreground quasar-offers a unique opportunity to probe the emission properties of quasars, in particular the emission geometry (obscuration, beaming) and the quasar lifetime. Building on the foreground quasar survey published in Schmidt et al., we present a detailed model of the He II transverse proximity effect, specifically designed to include light travel time effects, finite quasar ages, and quasar obscuration. We postprocess outputs from a cosmological hydrodynamical simulation with a fluctuating He II ultraviolet background model, with the added effect of the radiation from a single bright foreground quasar. We vary the age t(age) and obscured sky fractions Omega(obsc) of the foreground quasar, and explore the resulting effect on the He II transverse proximity effect signal. Fluctuations in intergalactic medium density and the ultraviolet background, as well as the unknown orientation of the foreground quasar, result in a large variance of the He II Ly alpha transmission along the background sightline. We develop a fully Bayesian statistical formalism to compare far-ultraviolet He II Ly alpha transmission spectra of the background quasars to our models, and extract joint constraints on t(age) and Omega(obsc) for the six Schmidt et al. foreground quasars with the highest implied He II photoionization rates. Our analysis suggests a bimodal distribution of quasar emission properties, whereby one foreground quasar, associated with a strong He II transmission spike, is relatively old (22 Myr) and unobscured (Omega(obsc) < 35%), whereas three others are either younger than 10 Myr or highly obscured (Omega(obsc) > 70%).