RESUMO
The interstellar medium (ISM) comprises gases at different temperatures and densities, including ionized, atomic and molecular species, and dust particles1. The neutral ISM is dominated by neutral hydrogen2 and has ionization fractions of up to eight per cent3. The concentration of chemical elements heavier than helium (metallicity) spans orders of magnitudes in Galactic stars4, because they formed at different times. However, the gas in the vicinity of the Sun is assumed to be well mixed and to have a solar metallicity in traditional chemical evolution models5. The ISM chemical abundances can be accurately measured with ultraviolet absorption-line spectroscopy. However, the effects of dust depletion6-9-which removes part of the metals from the observable gaseous phase and incorporates it into solid grains-have prevented, until recently, a deeper investigation of the ISM metallicity. Here we report the dust-corrected metallicity of the neutral ISM measured towards 25 stars in our Galaxy. We find large variations in metallicity over a factor of ten (with an average of 55 ± 7 per cent solar metallicity and a standard deviation of 0.28 dex), including many regions of low metallicity, down to about 17 per cent solar metallicity and possibly below. Pristine gas falling onto the Galactic disk in the form of high-velocity clouds can cause the observed chemical inhomogeneities on scales of tens of parsecs. Our results suggest that this low-metallicity accreting gas does not efficiently mix into the ISM, which may help us understand metallicity deviations in nearby coeval stars.
RESUMO
Every star-forming galaxy has a halo of metal-enriched gas that extends out to at least 100 kiloparsecs, as revealed by the absorption lines that this gas imprints on the spectra of background quasars. However, quasars are sparse and typically probe only one narrow beam of emission through the intervening galaxy. Close quasar pairs and gravitationally lensed quasars have been used to circumvent this inherently one-dimensional technique, but these objects are rare and the structure of the circumgalactic medium remains poorly constrained. As a result, our understanding of the physical processes that drive the recycling of baryons across the lifetime of a galaxy is limited. Here we report integral-field (tomographic) spectroscopy of an extended background source-a bright, giant gravitational arc. We can thus coherently map the spatial and kinematic distribution of Mg ɪɪ absorption-a standard tracer of enriched gas-in an intervening galaxy system at redshift 0.98 (around 8 billion years ago). Our gravitational-arc tomography unveils a clumpy medium in which the absorption strength decreases with increasing distance from the galaxy system, in good agreement with results for quasars. Furthermore, we find strong evidence that the gas is not distributed isotropically. Interestingly, we detect little kinematic variation over a projected area of approximately 600 square kiloparsecs, with all line-of-sight velocities confined to within a few tens of kilometres per second of each other. These results suggest that the detected absorption originates from entrained recycled material, rather than in a galactic outflow.