Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2002-09-10
Astrophys.J. 582 (2003) 49-59
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
13 pages, 5 figures. Uses onecolfloat.sty. Accepted to ApJ, September 3, 2002
Scientific paper
10.1086/344595
We investigate chemical abundance variations along the sightlines through 13 damped Lya systems (DLA). We introduce a technique designed to identify abundance variations in multiple velocity bins along the sightlines and perform a series of Monte-Carlo simulations to derive quantitative limits and values. The majority of these DLA have very uniform relative abundances: 95% c.l. upper limits of 0.2 dex dispersion along the sightline and best fit values typically <~0.1 dex. This surprising result indicates the gas comprising individual DLA has similar enrichment history, nearly identical differential depletion, and small abundance variations relating to ionization corrections. This uniformity contrasts with stellar abundance variations observed within the Galaxy and with the differences in abundances observed between galaxies of the Local group. It also contrasts with variations in differential depletion along sightlines through the SMC, LMC, and Milky Way. The results constrain the process of metal production and dust formation in the early universe and reflect on scenarios of galaxy formation. In terms of depletion the observations indicate a very low porosity of significantly depleted gas, substantially lower than the filling factor observed in present-day metal-poor galaxies. Finally, the observed chemical uniformity may present a difficult challenge to scenarios which assume individual DLA are comprised of multiple protogalactic clumps.
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