Published September 20, 2025 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Synergistic Radiative Transfer Modeling of Mg II and Lyα Emission in Multiphase, Clumpy Galactic Environments: Application to Low-redshift Lyman Continuum Leakers

  • 1. ROR icon Johns Hopkins University
  • 2. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 3. ROR icon Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
  • 4. ROR icon Northwestern University
  • 5. ROR icon Space Telescope Science Institute
  • 6. ROR icon Zhejiang University
  • 7. ROR icon The University of Texas at Austin
  • 8. ROR icon Arizona State University
  • 9. ROR icon University of Geneva
  • 10. ROR icon Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology
  • 11. ROR icon Claude Bernard University Lyon 1

Abstract

We conducted systematic radiative transfer (RT) modeling of the Mg ii doublet line profiles for 33 low-redshift Lyman continuum (LyC) leakers, and Lyα modeling for six of these galaxies, using a multiphase, clumpy circumgalactic medium (CGM) model. Our RT models successfully reproduced the Mg ii emission line profiles for all galaxies, revealing a necessary condition for strong LyC leakage: high maximum clump outflow velocity (v_(MgII,max) ≳ 390 km s¹) and low total Mg ii column density (NMgII, tot ≲ 1014.3 cm−2). These two parameters have the strongest influence on the emergent Mg ii profile. For the six galaxies with archival HST data, our Lyα modeling shows that their spectral properties do not consistently match conventional LyC leakage criteria. A direct comparison of the best-fit Mg ii and Lyα model parameters reveals no clear correlations in clump outflow velocities, column densities, or volume filling factors, suggesting that H i and Mg ii may not be kinematically or spatially coherent. The inferred LyC escape fraction from Lyα modeling is primarily governed by the number of optically thick H i clumps per sightline (fcl). Intriguingly, two galaxies with low observed LyC leakage exhibited the highest RT-inferred LyC escape fractions, due to having the lowest fcl values, driven by strong Lyα blue peaks. Future spatially resolved observations will be crucial for resolving this puzzle. Our results support a “picket fence” CGM geometry over a “density-bounded” scenario, where high Mg ii outflow velocities and low Mg ii column densities trace low-density H i channels that facilitate LyC escape.

Copyright and License

© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge the contributions of the LzLCS team members who made this project possible. This work was carried out at the Advanced Research Computing at Hopkins (ARCH) core facility (rockfish.jhu.edu), which is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant No. OAC 1920103. M.G. thanks the Max Planck Society for support through the Max Planck Research Group. Z.L. has been supported in part by grant AST-2009278 from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Numerical calculations were run on the Caltech compute cluster “Wheeler,” with allocations from XSEDE TG-AST130039 and PRAC NSF.1713353 supported by the NSF, as well as NASA HEC SMD-16-7592.

Facilities

HST - Hubble Space Telescope satellite (COS), MMT - MMT at Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (Blue channel), VLT - (X-Shooter), HET (LRS2) - .

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Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2410.11152 (arXiv)
Is supplemented by
Dataset: 10.17909/jkx2-py68 (DOI)

Funding

National Science Foundation
OAC-1920103
Max Planck Society
National Science Foundation
AST-2009278
National Science Foundation
TG-AST130039
National Science Foundation
NSF.1713353
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
HEC SMD-16-7592

Dates

Accepted
2025-07-23
Available
2025-09-15
Published online

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
Publication Status
Published