Indirect Evidence for Escaping Ionizing Photons in Local Lyman Break Galaxy Analogs

Understand

A population of early star-forming galaxies is the leading candidate for the re-ionization of the universe.

• It is still unclear what conditions and physical processes would enable a significant fraction of the ionizing photons to escape from these gas-rich galaxies.
• In this paper we present the results of the analysis of HST COS far-UV spectroscopy plus ancillary multi-waveband data of a sample of 22 low-redshift galaxies that are good analogs to typical star-forming galaxies at high-redshift.
• We measure three parameters that provide indirect evidence of the escape of ionizing radiation: (1) the residual intensity in the cores of saturated interstellar low-ionization absorption-lines.