Modeling 237 Lyman-α spectra of the MUSE-Wide survey

We compare 237 Lyman-alpha (Ly alpha) spectra of the MUSE-Wide survey to a suite of radiative transfer simulations consisting of a central luminous source within a concentric, moving shell of neutral gas, and dust. This six parameter shell-model has been used numerously in previous studies, however, on significantly smaller data-sets. We find that the shell-model can reproduce the observed spectral shape very well - better than the also common Gaussian-minus-Gaussian model which we also fitted to the dataset. Specifically, we find that similar to 94% of the fits possess a goodness-of-fit value of p(chi(2)) > 0.1. The large number of spectra allows us to robustly characterize the shell-model parameter range, and consequently, the spectral shapes typical for realistic spectra. We find that the vast majority of the Ly alpha spectral shapes require an outflow and only similar to 5% are well-fitted through an inflowing shell. In addition, we find similar to 46% of the spectra to be consistent with a neutral hydrogen column density <10(17) cm(-2) - suggestive of a non-negligible fraction of continuum leakers in the MUSE-Wide sample. Furthermore, we correlate the spectral against the Ly alpha halo properties against each other but do not find any strong correlation.