Luminous high-redshift Ly-alpha blobs (LABS), often also known as
Ly-alpha 'nebulae', ‘halos’ or ‘fuzz’ in the literature, promise to
yield important insights into the physics of massive galaxy formation.
As prodigious sources of HI Ly-alpha photons, with ~10-100 kpc spatial
extents, they provide an efficient way to select distant galaxies (or
proto-galaxies) expected to be undergoing significant mass-assembly.
In this talk, I will present results from a recently accepted paper in
which we used long slit spectroscopy from GTC+OSIRIS to examine the
geometry, powering, and origin of the LAB and an absorption line
system associated with a radio-loud quasar at z=2.54. I will also
discuss some interesting new results from long-slit spectropolarimetry
of LABs associated with z>2 radio galaxies, and their related
continuum structures.