Absorption-Line Detections of $10^{5-6}$ K Gas in Spiral-Rich Groups of
  Galaxies
  Using the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) on the Hubble Space Telescope
(HST) the COS Science Team has conducted a high signal-to-noise survey of 14
bright QSOs. In a previous paper (Savage et al. 2014) these far-UV spectra were
used to discover 14 "warm" ($T > 10^5$ K) absorbers using a combination of
broad Ly\alpha\ and O VI absorptions. A reanalysis of a few of this new class
of absorbers using slightly relaxed fitting criteria finds as many as 20 warm
absorbers could be present in this sample. A shallow, wide spectroscopic galaxy
redshift survey has been conducted around these sight lines to investigate the
warm absorber environment, which is found to be spiral-rich galaxy groups or
cluster outskirts with radial velocity dispersions of \sigma\ = 250-750 km/s.
While 2\sigma\ evidence is presented favoring the hypothesis that these
absorptions are associated with the galaxy groups and not with the individual,
nearest galaxies, this evidence has considerable systematic uncertainties and
is based on a small sample size so it is not entirely conclusive. If the
associations are with galaxy groups, the observed frequency of warm absorbers
(dN/dz = 3.5-5 per unit redshift) requires them to be very large (~1 Mpc in
radius at high covering factor). Most likely these warm absorbers are interface
gas clouds whose presence implies the existence of a hotter ($T \sim 10^{6.5}$
K), diffuse and probably very massive ($>10^{11}~M_{\odot}$) intra-group medium
which has yet to be detected directly.
