REVISITING THE FUSE DATA ARCHIVE - FINDING O-VI

Abstract

A significant majority of the galactic baryonic matter exists in the form of diffuse gas, known as the circumgalactic medium (CGM). The Far-UV O VI emission lines (1031.93, 1037.62 ˚A), corresponding to 6-times ionized Oxygen provide a crucial, but observationally challenging signal of warm-hot gas around a temperature of 105 − 106 K. Simulations of star forming galaxies indicate warm-hot gas contributes more mass than stars to the parent galaxy. This project revisited the entirety of the NASA FUSE (Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, 1999-2007) data archive, searching for more detections of extra-galactic O VI signal to 3σ. A high-performance data pipeline was created to look for this signal using a combination of computational methods, and manual observations. The goal of this project is to increase the number of O VI detections, which will inform the target selection for the NASA Aspera mission, a CubeSat spectroscopic telescope to be launched in 2025. While still in development, after a year of funding, this project did not make a contribution to the current known O VI emission product list.