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C.C. Steidel (Calfornia Institute of Technology)
We discuss the evidence for and implications of galaxy-scale high velocity outflows from star forming galaxies at high redshift. It appears that galactic winds are present in essentially every UV-selected star forming galaxy at high redshift; these winds are probably responsible for removing dust from the sites of rapid star formation, allowing for their discovery using rest-UV observations. The impact of the winds on the intergalactic medium (IGM) may be extremely important-- the outflows probably allow for leaking stellar Lyman continuum radiation from the galaxies (affecting the ionization state of the IGM), for the pollution of the diffuse IGM with metals, and possibly for altering the hydrodynamics of the IGM and therefore the degree to which it can be treated as a simple fluid tracing matter fluctuations. We present evidence that star forming galaxies have indeed altered the state of the IGM as compared to most theoretical model expectations.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: ccs@astro.caltech.edu