The Evolution of Metals and Dust in Damped Lyman-alpha Quasar Absorbers

Details The Evolution of Metals and Dust in Damped Lyman-alpha Quasar Absorbers The Evolution of Metals and Dust in Damped Lyman-alpha Quasar Absorbers

Feb 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003noao.prop..452k&link_type=abstract

NOAO Proposal ID #2003A-0452

Physics

Scientific paper

The evolution of metals and dust in galaxies provide important constraints on the global history of star formation in the Universe. Abundances of undepleted elements such as Zn in damped Lyman-alpha (DLA) quasar absorbers probe the metallicity of galaxies, while ratios such as Cr/Zn or Fe/Zn trace the dust content. Most cosmic chemical evolution models predict the mean metallicity to increase with time. But it is unclear whether or not DLAs actually show this trend. The main problem is the small number of Zn measurements available, especially at z ≲ 1.5, which spans 70 % of the cosmic history (for Ω_m=0.3 and Ω_(Lambda)=0.7). The enormous increase in the number of Mg II/DLA absorber detections from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and HST UV surveys provides us an opportunity to pin down the cosmic age-metallicity relation to unprecedented accuracy. Since Fall 2002, we have started a survey at the MMT to measure abundances in z < 1.5 DLAs discovered in SDSS or HST archives. Here we propose to extend our sample by observing Zn, Cr, Fe, Ni, Si in 8 more SDSS/HST DLAs with z < 1.5. We request 3 grey nights using the MMT blue channel spectrograph to achieve the necessary S/N and spectral resolution.

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