An excess of damped Lyman alpha galaxies near QSOs

Details An excess of damped Lyman alpha galaxies near QSOs An excess of damped Lyman alpha galaxies near QSOs

2005-12-07

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512210v1

Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc.367:412-422,2006

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Accepted for publication in MNRAS (13 pages, 6 figures)

Scientific paper

10.1111/j.1365-2966.2005.09964.x

We present a sample of 33 damped Lyman alpha systems (DLAs) discovered in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) whose absorption redshifts (z_abs) are within 6000 km/s of the QSO's systemic redshift (z_sys). Our sample is based on 731 2.5 < z_sys < 4.5 non-broad-absorption-line (non-BAL) QSOs from Data Release 3 (DR3) of the SDSS. We estimate that our search is ~100 % complete for absorbers with N(HI) >= 2e20 cm^-2. The derived number density of DLAs per unit redshift, n(z), within v < 6000 km/s is higher (3.5 sigma significance) by almost a factor of 2 than that of intervening absorbers observed in the SDSS DR3, i.e. there is evidence for an overdensity of galaxies near the QSOs. This provides a physical motivation for excluding DLAs at small velocity separations in surveys of intervening 'field' DLAs. In addition, we find that the overdensity of proximate DLAs is independent of the radio-loudness of the QSO, consistent with the environments of radio-loud and radio-quiet QSOs being similar.

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