Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2008-04-29
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
24 pages, 18 figures, MNRAS in press. Minor update with a few added details and typographical/grammatical fixes. Movie at ht
Scientific paper
10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.13782.x
We investigate the population of z=3 damped Lyman alpha absorbers (DLAs) in a recent series of high resolution galaxy formation simulations. The simulations are of interest because they form at z=0 some of the most realistic disk galaxies to date. No free parameters are available in our study: these have been fixed by physical and z=0 observational constraints, and thus our study provides a genuine consistency test. The precise role of DLAs in galaxy formation remains in debate, but they provide a number of strong constraints on the nature of our simulated bound systems at z=3 because of their coupled information on neutral H I densities, kinematics, metallicity and estimates of star formation activity. Our results, without any parameter-tuning, closely match the observed incidence rate and column density distributions of DLAs. Our simulations are the first to reproduce the distribution of metallicities (with a median of Z_{DLA} = Z_{solar}/20) without invoking observationally unsupported mechanisms such as dust biasing. This is especially encouraging given that these simulations have previously been shown to have a realistic 0
Booth Craig M.
Brooks Alyson
Governato Fabio
Haehnelt Martin
Pettini Max
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