Exoplanets and Stellar Physics

Abstract:

© 2019, © 2019 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. To halt global warming, the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by human activities such as fossil fuel burning, cement production, and deforestation needs to be brought all the way to zero. The longer it takes to do so, the hotter the world will get. Lack of progress towards decarbonization has created justifiable panic about the climate crisis. This has led to an intensified interest in technological climate interventions that involve increasing the reflection of sunlight to space by injecting substances into the stratosphere which lead to the formation of highly reflective particles. When first suggested, such albedo modification schemes were introduced as a “Plan B,” in case the world economy fails to decarbonize, and this scenario has dominated much of the public perception of albedo modification as a savior waiting in the wings to protect the world against massive climate change arising from a failure to decarbonize. But because of the mismatch between the millennial persistence time of carbon dioxide and the sub-decadal persistence of stratospheric particles, albedo modification can never safely play more than a very minor role in the portfolio of solutions. There is simply no substitute for decarbonization.

Abstract:

We simulate the flux emitted from galaxy haloes in order to quantify the brightness of the circumgalactic medium (CGM). We use dedicated zoom-in cosmological simulations with the hydrodynamical adaptive mesh refinement code RAMSES, which are evolved down to z = 0 and reach a maximum spatial resolution of 380 h⁻¹ pc and a gas mass resolution up to 1.8×10⁵ h⁻¹ M⊙ in the densest regions. We compute the expected emission from the gas in the CGM using CLOUDY emissivity models for different lines (e.g. Lyα, C IV, O VI, C VI, O VIII) considering UV background fluorescence, gravitational cooling and continuum emission. In the case of Lyα, we additionally consider the scattering of continuum photons. We compare our predictions to current observations and find them to be in good agreement at any redshift after adjusting the Lyα escape fraction. We combine our mock observations with instrument models for Faint Intergalactic Redshifted Emission Balloon-2 (FIREBall-2; UV balloon spectrograph) and HARMONI (visible and NIR IFU on the ELT) to predict CGM observations with either instrument and optimize target selections and observing strategies. Our results show that Lyα emission from the CGM at a redshift of 0.7 will be observable with FIREBall-2 for bright galaxies (NUV∼18 mag), while metal lines like O VI and C IV will remain challenging to detect. HARMONI is found to be well suited to study the CGM at different redshifts with various tracers.