TY  - JOUR
A1  - Tepper-Garcia, Thorsten
A1  - Richter, Philipp
A1  - Schaye, Joop
A1  - Booth, C. M.
A1  - Vecchia, Claudio Dalla
A1  - Theuns, Tom
A1  - Wiersma, Robert P. C.
T1  - Absorption signatures of warm-hot gas at low redshift o vi
T2  - Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
N2  - We investigate the origin and physical properties of O vi absorbers at low redshift (z = 0.25) using a subset of cosmological, hydrodynamical simulations from the OverWhelmingly Large Simulations (OWLS) project. Intervening O vi absorbers are believed to trace shock-heated gas in the warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM) and may thus play a key role in the search for the missing baryons in the present-day Universe. When compared to observations, the predicted distributions of the different O vi line parameters (column density, Doppler parameter, rest equivalent width W-r) from our simulations exhibit a lack of strong O vi absorbers, a discrepancy that has also been found by Oppenheimer & Dave. This suggests that physical processes on subgrid scales (e.g. turbulence) may strongly influence the observed properties of O vi systems. We find that the intervening O vi absorption arises mainly in highly metal enriched (10-1 < Z/Z(circle dot) less than or similar to 1) gas at typical overdensities of 1 < /<<>> less than or similar to 102. One-third of the O vi absorbers in our simulation are found to trace gas at temperatures T < 105 K, while the rest arises in gas at higher temperatures, most of them around T = 105.3 +/- 0.5 K. These temperatures are much higher than inferred by Oppenheimer & Dave, probably because that work did not take the suppression of metal-line cooling by the photoionizing background radiation into account. While the O vi resides in a similar region of (, T)-space as much of the shock-heated baryonic matter, the vast majority of this gas has a lower metal content and does not give rise to detectable O vi absorption. As a consequence of the patchy metal distribution, O vi absorbers in our simulations trace only a very small fraction of the cosmic baryons (< 2 per cent) and the cosmic metals. Instead, these systems presumably trace previously shock-heated, metal-rich material from galactic winds that is now mixing with the ambient gas and cooling. The common approach of comparing O vi and H i column densities to estimate the physical conditions in intervening absorbers from QSO observations may be misleading, as most of the H i (and most of the gas mass) is not physically connected with the high-metallicity patches that give rise to the O vi absorption.
KW  - methods: numerical
KW  - galaxies: formation
KW  - intergalactic medium
KW  - quasars: absorption lines
KW  - cosmology: theory
Y1  - 2011
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/36883
SN  - 0035-8711
VL  - 413
IS  - 1
SP  - 190
EP  - 212
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -