Are Sub-Damped Lyman-(alpha) Absorbers Reservoirs of the ``Missing Metals''?

Details Are Sub-Damped Lyman-(alpha) Absorbers Reservoirs of the ``Missing Metals''? Are Sub-Damped Lyman-(alpha) Absorbers Reservoirs of the ``Missing Metals''?

Feb 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007noao.prop..534m&link_type=abstract

NOAO Proposal ID #2007A-0534

Computer Science

Scientific paper

Historically, damped Lyman-(alpha) (DLA) systems have been used as probes of the neutral gas content of the universe. However these systems appear to show low metallicity and little evolution, contradicting the predictions of chemical evolution models and is known as the ``missing metals problem". A new and largely unexplored reservoir of cosmic metals has recently be found in lower neutral hydrogen column density absorbers, the sub-DLA systems. We have recently discovered several high metallicity sub-DLAs. These metal rich systems also typically have larger velocity widths than their DLA counterparts, perhaps implying that they are related to more massive galaxies, thus providing a way to study massive galaxies at high redshift. Also, if even a small portion of these sub-DLA systems are as metal rich as our recent discoveries, they may contribute quite significantly to the cosmic metal budget. We request three nights of observations with the Magellan II telescope with the MIKE spectrograph to investigate 12 sub-DLAs at 0.7 ⪉ z ⪉ 1.5 and one night of observations with the KECK-I/HIRESb spectrograph to study 3 sub-DLAs at 0.5 ⪉ z ⪉ 0.6. Our observations will double the number of z < 1.5 sub-DLAs and allow us to perform a systematic comparison of the DLA and sub-DLA absorbers in this redshift interval.

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