The role of the ionizing background on the thermal and non-thermal broadening inferred for the low-z intergalactic O vi absorbers

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using cosmological hydrodynamical simulations at z ∼ 0.5, we measure the thermal (bt) and non-thermal (bnt) contribution to the line broadening for the intergalactic absorbers having O vi and H i absorption well aligned in the velocity space. We find that the inferred temperature based on bt correlates strongly with the optical depth-weighted kinetic temperature of the absorbing gas, albeit with a large scatter. We show this scatter comes from the spread in the kinetic temperature of the gas contributing to the absorption and hence depends on the feedback processes and the ionizing UV background (UVB) used in the simulations. We show the distribution of bnt is also affected by both feedback processes and the ionizing UVB. Therefore, bnt derived using aligned absorbers may not be a good discriminator between the effect of microscopic turbulence and UVB. Instead, the distribution of bt and bnt together with the frequency of occurrence of the aligned absorbers can be used to place additional constraints on the parameters of the simulation for a given assumed UVB.