Detection of hot, metal-enriched outflowing gas around z ≈ 2.3 star-forming galaxies in the Keck Baryonic Structure Survey

We use quasar absorption lines to study the physical conditions in the circumgalactic medium of redshift z ≈ 2.3 star-forming galaxies taken from the Keck Baryonic Structure Survey. In Turner et al. we used the pixel optical depth technique to show that absorption by H i and the metal ions O vi, N v, C iv, C iii, and Si iv is strongly enhanced within |Δv| ≲ 170 km s−1 and projected distances |d| ≲ 180 proper kpc from sightlines to the background quasars. Here we demonstrate that the O vi absorption is also strongly enhanced at fixed H i, C iv, and Si iv optical depths, and that this enhancement extends out to ∼350 km s−1. At fixed H i the increase in the median O vi optical depth near galaxies is 0.3–0.7 dex and is detected at 2–3σ confidence for all seven H i bins that have $\log _{10}\tau _{\rm H\, {\small I}} \ge -1.5$ . We use ionization models to show that the observed strength of O vi as a function of H i is consistent with enriched, photoionized gas for pixels with $\tau _{\rm H\, {\small I}} \gtrsim 10$ . However, for pixels with $\tau _{\rm H\, {\small I}} \lesssim 1$ this would lead to implausibly high metallicities at low densities if the gas were photoionized by the background radiation. This indicates that the galaxies are surrounded by gas that is sufficiently hot to be collisionally ionized (T > 105 K) and that a substantial fraction of the hot gas has a metallicity ≳10−1 of solar. Given the high metallicity and large velocity extent (out to ∼1.5 v circ) of this gas, we conclude that we have detected hot, metal-enriched outflows arising from star-forming galaxies.