Observed Faraday Effects in Damped Lyα Absorbers and Lyman Limit Systems: The Magnetized Environment of Galactic Building Blocks at Redshift = 2

Protogalactic environments are typically identified using quasar absorption lines and can manifest as Damped Lyman-alpha Absorbers (DLAs) and Lyman Limit Systems (LLSs). We use radio observations of Faraday effects to test whether these galactic building blocks host a magnetized medium, by combining DLA and LLS detections with 1.4 GHz polarization data from the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS). We obtain a control, a DLA, and an LLS sample consisting of 114, 19, and 27 lines of sight, respectively. Using a Bayesian framework and weakly informative priors, we are unable to detect either coherent or random magnetic fields in DLAs: the regular coherent fields must be ≤2.8 μG, and the lack of depolarization suggests the weakly magnetized gas in DLAs is nonturbulent and quiescent. However, we find a mild suggestive indication that LLSs have coherent magnetic fields, with a 71.5% probability that LLSs have higher |RM| than a control, although this is sensitive to the redshift distribution. We also find a strong indication that LLSs host random magnetic fields, with a 95.5% probability that LLS lines of sight have lower polarized fractions than a control. The regular coherent fields within the LLSs must be ≤2.4 μG, and the magnetized gas must be highly turbulent with a typical turbulent length scale on the order of 5-20 pc. Our results are consistent with the standard dynamo paradigm, whereby magnetism in protogalaxies increases in coherence over cosmic time, and with a hierarchical galaxy formation scenario, with the DLAs and LLSs exploring different stages of magnetic field evolution in galaxies.