Directly constraining the spatial coherence of the z ∼ 1 circumgalactic medium

¹ Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de Chile, Camino el Observatorio 1515, Las Condes, Santiago, Chile
e-mail: aafruni@das.uchile.cl
² Instituto de Física, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Casilla, 4059 Valparaíso, Chile
³ Franco-Chilean Laboratory for Astronomy, IRL 3386, CNRS and Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile
⁴ Institute d’Astrophysique de Paris, CNRS-SU, UMR 7095, 98bis Bd Arago, 75014 Paris, France
⁵ European Southern Observatory, Alonso de Cordova 3107, Casilla, 19001 Santiago, Chile
⁶ Dipartimento di Fisica G. Occhialini, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Piazza della Scienza 3, 20126 Milano, Italy
⁷ Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos, Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias, Universidad Diego Portales, Av. Ejército Libertador 441, Santiago, Chile
⁸ Max Planck Institut für Astrophysik, Karl-Schwarzschild-Straße 1, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany
⁹ Instituto de Física, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, 7820436 Macul, Santiago, Chile

Received: 3 September 2023
Accepted: 16 October 2023

Abstract

One of the biggest puzzles regarding the circumgalactic medium (CGM) is the structure of its cool (T ∼ 10⁴ K) gas phase. While the kinematics of quasar absorption systems suggests the CGM is composed of a population of different clouds, constraining their extent and spatial distribution has proven challenging, both from theoretical and observational points of view. In this work, we study the spatial structure of the z ∼ 1 CGM with unprecedented detail via resolved spectroscopy of giant gravitational arcs. We put together a sample of Mg IIλλ2796, 2803 detections obtained with VLT/MUSE in 91 spatially independent and contiguous sight lines toward 3 arcs, each probing an isolated star-forming galaxy believed to be detected in absorption. We constrain the coherence scale of this gas (C_length) – which represents the spatial scale over which the Mg II equivalent width (EW) remains constant – by comparing EW variations measured across all sight lines with empirical models. We find 1.4 < C_length/kpc < 7.8 (95% confidence). This measurement, of unprecedented accuracy, represents the scale over which the cool gas tends to cluster in separate structures. We argue that, if C_length is a universal property of the CGM, it needs to be reproduced by current and future theoretical models in order for us to understand the exact role of this medium in galaxy evolution.