Evolution of the cosmological mass density of neutral gas from Sloan Digital Sky Survey II - Data Release 7

By P. Noterdaeme, P. Petitjean, C. Ledoux, R. Srianand. 2009

248 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the results of a search for damped Lyman-alpha (DLA) systems in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey II (SDSS), Data Release 7. We use a fully automatic procedure to identify DLAs and derive their column densities. The procedure is checked against the results of previous searches for DLAs in SDSS. We discuss the agreements and differences and show the robustness of our procedure. For each system, we obtain an accurate measurement of the absorber's redshift, the HI column density and the equivalent width of associated metal absorption lines, without any human intervention. We find 1426 absorbers with 2.15 =20, out of which 937 systems have log N(HI)>= 20.3. This is the largest DLA sample ever built, made available to the scientific community through the electronic version of this paper. In the course of the survey, we discovered the intervening DLA with highest HI column density known to date with log N(HI)=22.0+/-0.1. This single system provides a strong constraint on the high-end of the N(HI) frequency distribution now measured with high accuracy. We show that the presence of a DLA at the blue end of a QSO spectrum can lead to important systematic errors and propose a method to avoid them. This has important consequences for the measurement of the cosmological mass density of neutral gas at z~2.2 and therefore on our understanding of galaxy evolution over the past 10 billion years. [truncated]

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae2743073f6308d4521e712df05a706a7291f0dd

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Citations in the corpus

A new, precise measurement of the primordial abundance of deuterium (2012, background): “The number of known DLAs with metallicities less than 1/100 of solar has increased in recent years thanks to large scale sky surveys (Noterdaeme et al. 2009), and it is these systems that have proved to be choice candidates for measuring (D/H)p for the following reasons: (i) the low metallicities…”
THE ARECIBO LEGACY FAST ALFA SURVEY. X. THE H i MASS FUNCTION AND FROM THE 40% ALFALFA SURVEY (2010, background): “…with the value inferred from damped Lyman absorber (DLA) systems at z ∼ 2 and that significant evolution is required to reconcile measurements in the two epochs (Noterdaeme et al. 2009; Rao et al. 2006), while providing a tighter constraint on the present-day energy density of cold gas.”
METALLICITY EVOLUTION OF DAMPED Lyα SYSTEMS OUT TO z ∼ 5 (2012, background): “In addition, we wish to assess if there is a systematic bias in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)NHI statistics atz> 4 (Prochaska & Wolfe 2009; Noterdaeme et al. 2009), such as the column density distribution function, total covering fraction, and cosmologicalNHI mass density.”
THE EVOLUTION OF LYMAN LIMIT ABSORPTION SYSTEMS TO REDSHIFT SIX (2010, background): “The present data (black squares and 1 σ error bars) show no evolution in ΩDLA to z = 5 (see also Prochaska et al. 2005; Péroux et al. 2005; Noterdaeme et al. 2009; Guimarães et al. 2009).”
A DEFINITIVE SURVEY FOR LYMAN LIMIT SYSTEMS AT z ∼ 3.5 WITH THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY (2009, background): “Previous surveys at z > 3 have measured f(NHI, X) for column densities NHI ≥ 10 19 cm−2 (Prochaska et al. 2005; O’Meara et al. 2007; Prochaska & Wolfe 2009; Noterdaeme et al. 2009; Guimaraes et al. 2009).”
The Neutral Hydrogen Cosmological Mass Density at z = 5 (2015, methodology): “…2 < z < 4 using more than 10,000 QSOs assembled from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) (Prochaska & Herbert-Fort 2004; Prochaska et al. 2005; Prochaska & Wolfe 2009; Noterdaeme et al. 2009, 2012) have shown that there is very little evolution in the H I mass density from z = 3 to the present day.”
On the evolution of the H i column density distribution in cosmological simulations (2012, unknown): “…recent studies have extended these observations to both lower and higher HI column densities and to higher redshifts (e.g., Kim et al. 2002; Péroux et al. 2005; O’Meara et al. 2007; Noterdaeme et al. 2009; Prochaska et al. 2009; Prochaska & Wolfe 2009; O’Meara et al. 2012; Noterdaeme et al. 2012).”
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey quasar catalog: ninth data release (2012, methodology): “H i column density distribution for DLAs and subDLAs detected by Noterdaeme et al. (2009) in quasars observed both by SDSS-DR7 and BOSS (black histogram).”
THE BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY OF SDSS-III (2012, methodology): “DLA systems are then evaluated with an automated characterization to determine column densities (Noterdaeme et al. 2009).”
The most metal-poor damped Lyα systems: insights into chemical evolution in the very metal-poor regime★ (2011, background): “The most recent trawls through SDSS spectra of ∼ 8000 quasars with zem >∼ 2.2 has yielded a sample of ∼ 1000 DLAs (Noterdaeme et al. 2009; Prochaska & Wolfe 2009), of which ∼ 400 are classified as ‘metal-poor’ (Penprase et al. 2010).3 From compilations such as these, we selected a handful of…”
Absorption-line systems in simulated galaxies fed by cold streams (2011, background): “This column density threshold is in good agreement with the knee in the observed DLA column density distribution (Prochaska et al. 2005; Noterdaeme et al. 2009) that, indeed, is interpreted as the transition between atomic and molecular gas (e.g. Zwaan & Prochaska 2006).”
The ESO UVES advanced data products quasar sample: II. Cosmological evolution of the neutral gas mass density (2013, methodology): “They furthermore argued that the similarity of thefH I(N, z) at z = 3 (e.g., Noterdaeme et al. 2009) andz = 0 (Zwaan et al. 2005b) is due to the similarity of the highest central Hi surface densities of high-z and low-z disks. van de Voort et al. (2012) advocated that above logNH I = 17 most of the…”
LOW-RESOLUTION SPECTROSCOPY OF GAMMA-RAY BURST OPTICAL AFTERGLOWS: BIASES IN THE SWIFT SAMPLE AND CHARACTERIZATION OF THE ABSORBERS (2009, methodology): “We have used the original QSO-DLA sample from Noterdaeme et al. (2009) basedon the SDSS-DR6 database of QSO spe tra.”
The Lyman-α forest in three dimensions: measurements of large scale flux correlations from BOSS 1st-year data (2011, background): “The list is not complete however, since DLAs are difficult to detect along lines of sight of SNR < 4 [64].”
Cosmic evolution of the atomic and molecular gas contents of galaxies (2011, background): “…information about HI is very limited since it is based mostly on absorption-line measurements in the spectra of quasi-stellar object (QSO; e.g. Péroux et al. 2003; Prochaska et al. 2005; Rao et l. 2006; Guimarães et al. 2009; Noterdaeme et al. 2009; see Rauch 1998 for a review of this technique).”
Baryon acoustic oscillations at z = 2.34 from the correlations of Lyα absorption in eBOSS DR14 (2019, methodology): “In order to mask damped Lyα systems (DLA), we use the updated DR14 DLA catalog of Noterdaeme et al. (2009, 2012), which contains 34,541 DLA in 27,212 forests.”