Metal enrichment in the circumgalactic medium and Lyα haloes around quasars at z $\sim$3

Yucheng Guo, Roberto Maiolino, Linhua Jiang, Kenta Matsuoka, Tohru Nagao, Oli Luiz Dors Junior, Michele Ginolfi, Nick Henden, Jake Bennett, Debora Sijacki, Ewald Puchwein

Published 2020-01-15Version 1

Deep observations have detected extended Ly{\alpha} emission nebulae surrounding tens of QSOs at redshift 2 to 6. However, the metallicity of such extended haloes is still poorly understood. We perform a detailed analysis on a large sample of 80 quasars at z$\sim$3 based on MUSE-VLT data. We find clear evidence of extended emission of the UV nebular lines C IV {\lambda}1549 and He II {\lambda}1640 for about 18$\%$ of the sample, while C III] {\lambda}1909 is only marginally detected in a few objects. By stacking the cubes we detect emission of C IV, He II and C III] out to a radius of about 45 kpc. C IV and He II show a radial decline much steeper than Ly{\alpha}, while C III] shows a shallower profile similar to Ly{\alpha} in the inner 45 kpc. We infer that the average metallicity of the circumgalactic gas within the central 30-50 kpc is $\sim$0.5 solar, or even higher. However, we also find evidence of a component of the Ly{\alpha} haloes, which has much weaker metal emission lines relative to Ly{\alpha}. We suggest that the high metallicity of the circumgalactic medium within the central 30-50 kpc is associated with chemical pre-enrichment by past quasar-driven outflows and that there is a more extended component of the CGM that has much lower metallicity and likely associated with near-pristine gas accreted from the intergalactic medium. We show that our observational results are in good quantitative agreement with the expectations of the FABLE cosmological simulations.