Deep rest-frame far-UV spectroscopy of the giant Lyman-alpha emitter 'Himiko'

Understand

We present deep 10h VLT/XSHOOTER spectroscopy for an extraordinarily luminous and extended Lya emitter at z=6.595 referred to as Himiko and first discussed by Ouchi et al.

• (2009), with the purpose of constraining the mechanisms powering its strong emission.
• Complementary to the spectrum, we discuss NIR imaging data from the CANDELS survey.
• We find neither for HeII nor any metal line a significant excess, with 3 sigma upper limits of 6.8, 3.1, and 5.8x10^{-18} erg/s/cm^2 for CIV $\lambda$1549, HeII $\lambda$1640, CIII] $\lambda$1909, respectively, assuming apertures with 200 km/s widths and offset by -250 km/s w.r.t to the peak Lya redshift.