Evidence of Hierarchical Galaxy Formation from Strong MgII Absorbers

Details Evidence of Hierarchical Galaxy Formation from Strong MgII Absorbers Evidence of Hierarchical Galaxy Formation from Strong MgII Absorbers

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...20919706m&link_type=abstract

2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #197.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society,

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We consider the evoluton of strong MgII absorbers, most of which are closely related to luminous galaxies. Using high resolution quasar spectra from the VLT/UVES public archive, we examine these absorbers in the redshift range 0.3 < z < 2.5. The most significant evolution is in the number of separate subsystems in an MgII λ 2796 profile, which increases with decreasing redshift. We find that neither equivalent width nor kinematic spread (the optical depth weighted second moment of velocity) of MgII λ 2796 evolve. However, the kinematic spread is sensitive to the highest velocity component, and therefore not as sensitive to additional weak components at intermediate velocities relative to the profile center. The fraction of absorbing pixels within the full velocity range of the system does show a trend of decreasing with decreasing redshift. Most high redshift systems exhibit absorption over the entire system velocity range. This a result of low redshift MgII profiles tending to represent well formed galaxies, many of which have kinematics of a disk/halo structure. Many high redshift MgII profiles show evidence of protogalactic structures with multiple accretion events. Although these results are derived from measurements of gas kinematics, they are consistent with hierarchical galaxy formation evidenced by deep galaxy surveys.

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