Expansion-cooled Lyman-alpha clouds

Abstract

It is shown that recent observations by Pettini et al. (1990) which indicate that low-N H I Ly-alpha forest lines have small velocity widths and that the velocity widths are positively correlated with N (H I) can be understood as the result of adiabatic cooling of expanding clouds. It is argued that expansion cooling can efficiently lower temperatures and velocity widths of diffuse ionized clouds, and that this trend of diminishing temperature and velocity width in a wide range of plausible cloud models is consistent with double-quasar data. Expansion can provide a natural explanation for the steep z-evolution of the cloud numbers.