Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Jun 1991
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1991a%26a...246l..59f&link_type=abstract
Astronomy and Astrophysics (ISSN 0004-6361), vol. 246, no. 1, June 1991, p. L59-L62.
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
9
Absorption Spectra, Chemical Evolution, Galactic Evolution, Halos, Quasars, Star Formation, Stellar Spectra, Cosmology, Interplanetary Magnetic Fields, Line Spectra, Red Shift, Spectrum Analysis
Scientific paper
Observations of C IV in the wavelength range between 1548 and 1550 A and Mg II in the wavelength range between 2796 and 2803 QSO absorption lines show evidence for a maximum in the number of absorption systems per redshift interval at some redshift in the range between 1 and 1.5. Such a maximum can be interpreted in terms of chemical enrichment (at high redshifts) and heavy element dilution (at low redshifts) in the halos of galaxies along the line of sight to the QSO. It is shown that in chemocosmological evolutionary models the very appearance of such a maximum enrichment together with a dilution effect at low redshift is subject to tight constraints on the parameters of the model: in the halos of these intervening galaxies the star formation rate must have been declining strongly enough with time, the gas content must be not more than 10 percent and, most important, the IMF must be steeper in the high mass range than a Salpeter IMF and could possibly even be flatter in the low mass range than a Scalo IMF. Thus, QSO absorption line observations compared to chemocosmological galaxy evolution models can provide information about the star formation history and the IMF in galaxies at redshifts not more than 3.7, corresponding to an evolutionary age of these galaxies of only 1 - 2 Gyr.
Alvensleben Uta Fritze--v.
Fricke Klaus J.
Krüger Hans
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