Speaker
Description
The reservoir of baryons and metals surrounding galaxies is known as
the circumgalactic medium (CGM). The CGM plays a crucial role in the
growth of galaxies; galaxies require a continuous gas supply to sustain
star formation, and this gas accretion process is regulated by feedback
from newly formed stars. However, observational analysis of the CGM is
challenging. Not only because the low gas density makes the CGM difficult
to image directly, but the CGM also consists of gas structures of
different temperatures and densities. We will present our work on
studying the cool (~10^4 K) and warm-hot (~10^5.5 K) CGM of low-redshift,
star-forming galaxies. In particular, we will focus on the kinematics of
the warm-hot gas traced by the highly ionized O VI absorption detected in
sightlines of background quasars. We compare the OVI kinematics with
that of the low-ionization-state gas and the galactic disk rotation.
In addition to showing the low-ionization-state gas corotates with the
disk, a result often shown in previous work, corotating OVI gas is also
common, especially in the inner CGM. We will summarize our recent results
and discuss the implications of our analyses.