# The Detection of Two Distinct High Ionization States in a QSO Lyman Limit Absorption System: Evidence for Hierarchical Galaxy Formation at 𝑧∼3?

## 1 Introduction

Absorption systems with enough neutral Hydrogen to be optically thick to Lyman continuum radiation are commonly found in the spectra of high redshift QSOs. These Lyman limit (LLS) and damped Lyman alpha (DLA) systems often show line absorption from multiple ionization states of several different elements, most commonly Carbon and Silicon. It is often assumed that optically thick absorption systems contain gas in two separate phases – gas that is shielded from UV background Lyman continuum radiation and thus contains low ions such as CII and SiII, and gas that is not completely shielded from the UV background and thus shows high ionization species such as CIV and SiIV. The low ions are believed to be in a separate phase from the high ions because in DLA systems all low ions have a similar velocity structure that appears to have no relation to the velocity structure of the high ions, all of which also have a similar velocity structure (Prochaska and Wolfe 1997).

In recent years, many groups have begun to use numerical simulations to simulate the formation of structure in variants of cold dark matter (CDM) Universes (Cen et al. 1994; Zhang, Anninos, & Norman 1995; Hernquist et al. 1996). These simulations naturally produce absorbers that at least superficially resemble LLS and DLA systems as a natural result of the hierarchical structure formation that takes place in CDM models (Katz et al. 1996; Gardner et al. 1997). In most simulations LLS and DLAs have very similar physical structures and tend to be protogalaxies in the process of formation via the merging of several smaller structures.

There is not complete agreement within the community that the structures identified in the CDM simulations accurately represent the absorbers seen in actual QSO spectra. In particular, Prochaska and Wolfe (1997) find that the kinematics of DLA low ionization gas is consistent with the gas being located in a thick rotating disk – a picture that is quite different from the simulation results. Nonetheless, the advent of numerical simulations has sparked a renaissance in the study of QSO absorption systems, and the simulations are now making detailed predictions about the observed properties of absorption systems, including the metal lines in DLAs and LLS.

Rauch et al. (1997) calculated the expected metal absorption from DLA and LLS systems found in a CDM simulation with the assumption that the absorbing gas had a uniform metallicity. They found that while the low ions are all found in the same gas, the gas producing most of the SiIV absorption is not the same gas producing C IV or O VI absorption. As expected, they found that absorption from low ions occurs in only the highest density gas near the center of the protogalactic structures. The high ions were found in lower density gas surrounding the protogalactic clump, in a structure resembling an onion. SiIV was found only very close to the center, much like the low ions. CIV was found primarily in low density gas further out, and OVI was found mainly in even lower density gas further yet from the center of the clump. SiIV and CIV were found in gas inside the shock front of a collapsing object, whereas OVI was found in gas still falling into the structure. This resulted in OVI lines that were systematically wider than the CIV or SiIV lines.

In this letter we present the first multiple component OVI absorption features to be detected in a high $`z`$ intervening absorption system. The only other OVI detection at high $`z`$ (Kirkman and Tytler, 1997) contained only one component, and only the $`\lambda `$ 1032 line of the $`\lambda `$ 1032, 1039 doublet was detected because of blending. Here we report the detection of at least 5 OVI components in both members of the $`\lambda `$ 1032, 1039 doublet in the $`z2.77`$ LLS towards 1157+3143 . We also see SiIV, CIV, CII, SiII, and SiIII. This system is remarkable because, as we will show, all high ions have a very similar velocity structure, yet we are able to show on observational grounds alone that the OVI absorption cannot all be occurring in the same gas producing the CIV and SiIV absorption.

## 2 The $`z2.77`$ LLS

We observed QSO 1157+3143 for a total of 7 hours in March 1996 and January 1997 with the HIRES spectrograph (Vogt 1992) on the W.M. Keck Telescope during our search for deuterium. The resulting spectrum has a resolution of 7.9 km s<sup>-1</sup> and a SNR $`50`$ per 0.03 Å pixel. The spectrum was reduced and extracted in the standard fashion (e.g. Kirkman and Tytler, 1997).

There are two LLS in this spectrum, one at $`z2.94`$ and another at $`z2.77`$. The $`z2.94`$ LLS in this spectrum shows neither OVI nor CIV and will not be discussed. We do not have a good estimate of the HI column for the $`z2.77`$ LLS because the $`z2.94`$ LLS blots out the spectrum below 3600 Å which prevents us from seeing any Lyman series line higher than Ly$`\gamma `$ . Nonetheless, we believe the $`z2.77`$ system is a Lyman limit because it shows both CII and SiII, neither of which are expected to be present in an absorption system that is not optically thick to Lyman continuum radiation. The lines associated with the $`z2.77`$ partial LLS found in this spectrum are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 2 shows the OVI and CIV lines of this system in more detail. We used VPFIT (Webb, 1987) to fit Voigt profiles to the lines shown in Figure 2; the line parameters appear above each line in the figure. While fitting, we did not in any way tie line parameters between different elements – the OVI fit is completely independent of the CIV fit. Although there is not a 1-to-1 correspondence between the OVI and CIV lines in Figure 2, it is clear that the velocity structure of the OVI lines does trace the velocity structure of the CIV lines. Figure 2 also gives the impression that the OVI absorption is a smeared out version of the CIV absorption. This impression is confirmed by noting that the $`b`$ values are larger for OVI than for CIV for the absorbers centered near $`140`$ km s<sup>-1</sup> and 40 km s<sup>-1</sup> , which are well defined and lightly blended lines in all three species.

There is more than apparent similarity between the OVI and CIV lines in this absorption system. In Figure 3, we show that the OVI lines can be accurately fit using only profiles restricted to be at the same velocity as the identified CIV lines. While the velocities of the OVI lines in Figure 3 were fixed, the column densities and $`b`$ values of each line were allowed to vary to produce the best match to the observed spectrum. Note that in the final fit the $`b`$ value in each OVI component is $`2`$ times as large as in the corresponding CIV component, and that the column density ratio N(OVI)/N(CIV) varies only by $`5`$ between the different components.

## 3 Ionization State of the $`z2.77`$ LLS

The ionization state of this system is not well constrained by the available data. This is because the OVI and CIV line widths in this system prevent us from using the commonly made assumption that all of the lines at the same velocity arise in the same gas. Thus we can not use the column density ratios of the observed ions to work out the ionization state of the system using assuming either photo or collisional ionization equilibrium. As demonstrated in Figure 3, the OVI line is wider that the CIV line in each velocity component of this LLS. Since Oxygen is heavier than Carbon, this means that some or all of the OVI absorption is arising in gas different than that producing the CIV absorption – there are at least two phases of gas in this system. The phase which produces the OVI absorption is either warmer or more turbulent than the phase producing the CIV absorption.

All of the OVI lines associated with this system have $`b>17`$ km s<sup>-1</sup> , which is equivalent to T $`>2.8\times 10^5`$ K if the line widths are thermal. An ionization parameter of $`U>1`$ is required for the UV background (assuming the spectrum is a QSO like $`1.5`$ power law) to photoheat gas to this temperature (Donahue and Shull, 1991). Since it is unlikely that gas associated with a LLS is this rarefied, the large OVI $`b`$ values probably mean that the lines are widened by non-thermal motions, are collisionally ionized, or are actually several lines so close to each other in velocity space that their individual profiles can not be resolved.

Except for the components at $`50`$ and $`+65`$ km s<sup>-1</sup> , all of the CIV lines have $`6<b<8`$ km s<sup>-1</sup> . This corresponds to a maximum temperature of $`2.64.6\times 10^4`$ K. This is too cold for collisionally ionized gas to show CIV absorption, so the CIV lines must be photoionized. It is tempting to use the observed column densities of CIV, SiIV, SiII and CII to constrain the ionization states of the velocity components of this system by assuming they are in photoionization equilibrium with the UV background. However, we feel that this would be a mistake. The main result we draw from this data is that each velocity component of the LLS contains at least two phases of gas. We feel that this result warrants re-examination of the commonly made assumption that all of the absorption seen at the same velocity arises in the same gas. In particular, if the OVI and CIV absorption do not arise in the same gas, there is no good reason to assume that the CIV and SiIV absorption comes from the same gas, and good reason to suspect that the CIV and CII absorption does not arise in the same gas.

## 4 Discussion

There are several scenarios that can give rise to multiple high ionization phases of gas in an individual component of an absorption line system. The absorbing gas may contain pockets of cool or warm (CIV, SiIV) gas intermixed with pockets of hot gas (OVI). In this scenario a method must be found to widen the OVI lines; presumably they would arise in small pockets of shock heated gas and/or expanding gas around collapsing substructure within each component (stars?). The similar metal column ratios imply the structure within each of the components is similar as well.

In a more likely scenario, the multiple phases are explained by density gradients in the absorbing components at each velocity. Moving along the gradient, the photoionization parameter of the gas will change, giving a large number of effective gas phases. As discussed in the introduction, this sort of situation was produced in the simulations run by Rauch et al. In this scenario, the wide OVI lines are produced primarily because the OVI absorbing gas is falling into the collapsing structure, whereas the CIV absorbing gas is at rest behind the shock front. The observed wide OVI lines and the similar component structure of this LLS suggest we may be observing the formation of a protogalaxy by the merging of several smaller structures. There is, however, at least one major difference between the data and the Rauch et al. simulation. In this system, the SiIV absorption is strong and has the same velocity structure as the other high ions. In the simulations this will only occur if each velocity component is centered on the line of sight to the QSO because of the small effective cross section of SiIV absorbing gas from the center of a collapsed object. This seems improbable. It will be interesting to see if the OVI lines observed at high resolution in other LLS agree with the physical picture of the LLS suggested by these observations.

We thank Tom Bida and Barbara Schafer with the W.M. Keck Observatory for assistance with our observations of 1157+3143 , and Tom Barlow for providing a copy of his extraction software which allowed us to rapidly do science with our data. We thank Bob Carswell for making his VPFIT software package available to us. This work was supported in part by NSF grant 31217A and by NAGW4497 from NASA.