2011ApJ...743...18D

Thermally broadened Lyα absorbers (BLAs) offer an alternate method to using highly ionized metal absorbers (O VI, O VII, etc.) to probe the warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM, T = 10⁵-10⁷ K). Until now, WHIM surveys via BLAs have been no less ambiguous than those via far-UV and X-ray metal-ion probes. Detecting these weak, broad features requires background sources with a well-characterized far-UV continuum and data of very high quality. However, a recent Hubble Space Telescope/Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) observation of the z = 0.03 blazar Mrk 421 allows us to perform a metal-independent search for WHIM gas with unprecedented precision. The data have high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N ~ 50 per ∼20 km/s resolution element) and the smooth, power-law blazar spectrum allows a fully parametric continuum model. We analyze the Mrk 421 sight line for BLA absorbers, particularly for counterparts to the proposed O VII WHIM systems reported by Nicastro et al. based on Chandra/Low Energy Transmission Grating observations. We derive the Lyα profiles predicted by the X-ray observations. The S/N of the COS data is high (S/N ~ 25 pixel^–1), but much higher S/N can be obtained by binning the data to widths characteristic of the expected BLA profiles. With this technique, we are sensitive to WHIM gas over a large (N_H, T) parameter range in the Mrk 421 sight line. We rule out the claimed Nicastro et al. O VII detections at their nominal temperatures (T ∼ 1-2x10⁶ K) and metallicities (Z = 0.1 Z_☉) at ≳ 2σ level. However, WHIM gas at higher temperatures and/or higher metallicities is consistent with our COS non-detections.