Speaker
Description
Recent measurements of a high mass for the LMC imply the LMC should host a massive Magellanic Corona, a collisionally ionized, warm-hot gaseous halo at the virial temperature $\sim10^{5.4}$ K initially extending out to the virial radius (100 - 130 kpc). Such a primordial Magellanic Corona would have shaped and fed the formation of the Magellanic Stream (e.g. Lucchini et al. 2020). Now, we have discovered direct observational evidence for this Magellanic Corona via highly ionized oxygen (O VI), and indirect detections via C IV and Si IV, seen in UV absorption toward background quasars using data from HST and FUSE (Krishnarao et al. 2022, Nature), We find the Magellanic Corona is part of a pervasive multiphase Magellanic CGM seen in many ionization states with a declining projected radial profile out to at least 35 kpc from the LMC and a total ionized CGM mass of $10^{(9.1 +/- 0.2)}M_\odot$. This independently confirms the large mass of the LMC as dynamically predicted. The evidence for the Magellanic Corona is a crucial step forward in characterizing the Magellanic Group and its nested evolution with the Local Group and will help us diagnose the impact of galactic scale winds emerging from star formation feedback in the LMC. In future work from an accepted HST Legacy Archival Program (PI: Kat Barger), we will directly measure and map this galactic scale outflow and the Magellanic Corona using hundreds of sightlines towards stars in the LMC from the ULYSSES program (Roman-Duval et al. 2020).
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