Diffuse Lyα haloes around galaxies at z = 2.2–6.6: implications for galaxy formation and cosmic reionization

We present diffuse Lyα haloes (LAHs) identified in the composite Subaru narrow-band images of 100–3600 Lyα emitters (LAEs) at z = 2.2, 3.1, 3.7, 5.7, and 6.6. First, we carefully examine potential artefacts mimicking LAHs that include a large-scale point-spread function made by instrumental and atmospheric effects. Based on our critical test with composite images of non-LAE samples whose narrow-band-magnitude and source-size distributions are the same as our LAE samples, we confirm that no artefacts can produce a diffuse extended feature similar to our LAHs. After this test, we measure the scalelengths of exponential profile for the LAHs estimated from our z = 2.2–6.6 LAE samples of LLyα ≳ 2 × 1042 erg s−1. We obtain the scalelengths of ≃5–10 kpc at z = 2.2–5.7, and find no evolution of scalelengths in this redshift range beyond our measurement uncertainties. Combining this result and the previously known UV-continuum size evolution, we infer that the ratio of LAH to UV-continuum sizes is nearly constant at z = 2.2–5.7. The scalelength of our z = 6.6 LAH is larger than 5-10 kpc just beyond the error bar, which is a hint that the scalelengths of LAHs would increase from z = 5.7 to 6.6. If this increase is confirmed by future large surveys with significant improvements of statistical and systematical errors, this scalelength change at z ≳ 6 would be a signature of increasing fraction of neutral hydrogen scattering Lyα photons, due to cosmic reionization