The Cycle of Gaseous Baryons Between the Disk and Halo

The gaseous halo surrounding a galaxy disk is often referred to as the circum-galactic medium (CGM). The boundary of the CGM is loosely defined as the virial radius of the galaxy. Recent observations and simulations have shown that the CGM is massive, multiphase, clumpy, and metal-enriched. The CGM plays an important role in galaxy formation and evolution – it serves as a massive baryonic reservoir, from which the disk accretes gas fuel to sustain the star-formation activities, and to which the disk deposits feedback material. This dissertation focuses on the gas distribution in the CGM of the Milky Way (MW) and the baryon cycle between the CGM and disk of our neighbor – the Triangulum Galaxy (M33). Observations of the MW’s CGM are unavoidably contaminated by foreground gas since we reside in the MW’s disk. Conventionally, a velocity cut at |VLSR|~100 km/s is used as a proxy for distance, with low-velocity (|VLSR|<100 km/s) gas being more nearby to the Galactic disk than high-velocity gas. Using both a MW-mass simulation and all-sky QSO observations, I show that the low-velocity gas in the MW’s CGM is as massive as their high-velocity counterpart, and that the MW most likely hosts