Paper detail

Filamentary Large Scale Structure Traced by Six Ly-alpha Blobs at z=2.3

Extended nebulae of Ly-alpha emission ("Ly-alpha blobs") are known to be associated with overdense regions at high redshift. Here we present six large Ly-alpha blobs in a previously known protocluster with galaxy overdensity delta ~ 7 at z = 2.3; this is the richest field of giant Ly-alpha blobs detected to date. The blobs have linear sizes >~100 kpc and Ly-alpha luminosities of ~10^43 erg/s. The positions of the blobs define two linear filaments with an extent of at least 12 comoving Mpc; these filaments intersect at the center of one of the blobs. Measurement of the position angles of the blobs indicates that five of the six are aligned with these filaments to within ~10 degrees, suggesting a connection between the physical processes powering extended Ly-alpha emission and those driving structure on larger scales.