A Survey of the Metal Content of the Intergalactic Medium at High-redshift through Quasar Absorption Line Studies

Details A Survey of the Metal Content of the Intergalactic Medium at High-redshift through Quasar Absorption Line Studies A Survey of the Metal Content of the Intergalactic Medium at High-redshift through Quasar Absorption Line Studies

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...211.7202f&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #72.02; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.863

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We report the results of a systematic search for signatures of the IGM in QSO spectra of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), focusing on finding intervening absorbers via detection of their OVI doublet. We present the search algorithm, and criteria for distinguishing candidates from spurious Lyman forest interlopers. We obtain a sample of 1866 OVI doublet candidates with rest-frame equivalent width >0.15 Å in 855 AGN spectra (out of 3702 objects with redshifts in the range accessible for OVI detection). This initial sample is further subdivided into 3 groups according to the likelihood of being real, and the potential for follow-up observations of the candidate. The group with the cleanest and most secure candidates is comprised of 145 candidates, 69 of these reside at velocity separations of more than 5000 km/s from the QSO, and are thus tentatively classified as intervening absorbers. Most of these absorbers have not been picked up by earlier, automated QSO absorption line detection algorithms. This sample increases the number of known OVI absorbers at redshifts z > 2.7 substantially.
With this sample at hand, a secure lower limit for the rate of incidence of strong OVI absorbers per redshift interval, dn/dz (W>0.15 Å, 2.8 2.8 x 10-8 h-1.
We propose to obtain observations of some of the candidates with the best signatures for OVI absorption with high-S/N and high-resolution in order to estimate the reliability of our search algorithm and better constrain the physical nature of the absorbers.

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