zELDA II: Reconstruction of galactic Lyman-alpha spectra attenuated by the intergalactic medium using neural networks

Gurung-López S, Byrohl C, Gronke M, Spinoso D, Torralba Torregrosa A, Fernández-Soto A, Arnalte-Mur P, Martínez VJ. 2025. zELDA II: Reconstruction of galactic Lyman-alpha spectra attenuated by the intergalactic medium using neural networks. Astronomy and Astrophysics. 698, A139.

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Author
Gurung-López, Siddhartha; Byrohl, Chris; Gronke, Max; Spinoso, Daniele; Torralba Torregrosa, AlbertoISTA; Fernández-Soto, Alberto; Arnalte-Mur, Pablo; Martínez, Vicent J.
Department
Abstract
Context. The observed Lyman-alpha (Lyα) line profile is a convolution of the complex Lyα radiative transfer taking place in the interstellar, circumgalactic, and intergalactic media (ISM, CGM, and IGM, respectively). Discerning the different components of the Lyα line is crucial in order to use it as a probe of galaxy formation or the evolution of the IGM. Aims. We aim to present the second version of zELDA (redshift Estimator for Line profiles of Distant Lyman-Alpha emitters), an open-source Python module focused on modelling and fitting observed Lyα line profiles. This new version of zELDA focuses on disentangling the galactic from the IGM effects. Methods. We built realistic Lyα line profiles that include the ISM and IGM contributions by combining the Monte Carlo radiative-transfer simulations for the so-called shell model (ISM) and IGM transmission curves generated from TNG100. We used these mock line profiles to train different artificial neural networks. These use the observed spectrum as input and the outflow parameters of the best fitting ‘shell model’ as output along with the redshift and Lyα emission IGM escape fraction of the source. Results. We measured the accuracy of zELDA on mock Lyα line profiles. We find that zELDA is capable of reconstructing the ISM emerging Lyα line profile with high levels of accuracy (Kolmogórov-Smirnov<0.1) for 95% of the cases for HST/COS-like observations and 80% for MUSE-WIDE-like observations. zELDA is able to measure the IGM transmission with typical uncertainties below 10% for HST/COS and MUSE-WIDE data. Conclusions. This work represents a step forward in the high-precision reconstruction of IGM-attenuated Lyα line profiles. zELDA allows the disentanglement of the galactic and IGM contribution shaping the Lyα line shape and thus allows us to use Lyα as a tool to study galaxy and ISM evolution.
Publishing Year
Date Published
2025-06-01
Journal Title
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Publisher
EDP Sciences
Acknowledgement
The authors acknowledge the financial support from the MICIU with funding from the European Union NextGenerationEU and Generalitat Valenciana in the call Programa de Planes Complementarios de I+D+i (PRTR 2022) Project (VAL-JPAS), reference ASFAE/2022/025. This work is part of the research Project PID2023-149420NB-I00 funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ERDF/EU. This work is also supported by the project of excellence PROMETEO CIPROM/2023/21 of the Conselleria de Educación, Universidades y Empleo (Generalitat Valenciana). MG thanks the Max Planck Society for support through the Max Planck Research Group. DS acknowledges the support by the Tsinghua Shui Mu Scholarship, funding of the National Key R&D Program of China (grant no. 2023YFA1605600), the science research grants from the China Manned Space Project with no. CMS-CSST2021-A05, and the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program (no. 20223080023). This research made use of matplotlib, a Python library for publication quality graphics (Hunter 2007), NumPy (Harris et al. 2020) and SciPy (Virtanen et al. 2020).
Volume
698
Article Number
A139
ISSN
eISSN
IST-REx-ID

Cite this

Gurung-López S, Byrohl C, Gronke M, et al. zELDA II: Reconstruction of galactic Lyman-alpha spectra attenuated by the intergalactic medium using neural networks. Astronomy and Astrophysics. 2025;698. doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202453547
Gurung-López, S., Byrohl, C., Gronke, M., Spinoso, D., Torralba Torregrosa, A., Fernández-Soto, A., … Martínez, V. J. (2025). zELDA II: Reconstruction of galactic Lyman-alpha spectra attenuated by the intergalactic medium using neural networks. Astronomy and Astrophysics. EDP Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202453547
Gurung-López, Siddhartha, Chris Byrohl, Max Gronke, Daniele Spinoso, Alberto Torralba Torregrosa, Alberto Fernández-Soto, Pablo Arnalte-Mur, and Vicent J. Martínez. “ZELDA II: Reconstruction of Galactic Lyman-Alpha Spectra Attenuated by the Intergalactic Medium Using Neural Networks.” Astronomy and Astrophysics. EDP Sciences, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202453547.
S. Gurung-López et al., “zELDA II: Reconstruction of galactic Lyman-alpha spectra attenuated by the intergalactic medium using neural networks,” Astronomy and Astrophysics, vol. 698. EDP Sciences, 2025.
Gurung-López S, Byrohl C, Gronke M, Spinoso D, Torralba Torregrosa A, Fernández-Soto A, Arnalte-Mur P, Martínez VJ. 2025. zELDA II: Reconstruction of galactic Lyman-alpha spectra attenuated by the intergalactic medium using neural networks. Astronomy and Astrophysics. 698, A139.
Gurung-López, Siddhartha, et al. “ZELDA II: Reconstruction of Galactic Lyman-Alpha Spectra Attenuated by the Intergalactic Medium Using Neural Networks.” Astronomy and Astrophysics, vol. 698, A139, EDP Sciences, 2025, doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202453547.
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