Average Extinction Curves and Relative Abundances for QSO Absorption Line Systems at 1 <= z_abs < 2
Abstract
We have studied a sample of 809 Mg II absorption systems with 1.0 < z_abs < 1.86 in the spectra of SDSS QSOs, with the aim of understanding the nature and abundance of the dust and the chemical abundances in the intervening absorbers. Normalized, composite spectra were derived, for abundance measurements, for the full sample and several sub-samples, chosen on the basis of the line strengths and other absorber and QSO properties. Average extinction curves were obtained for the sub-samples by comparing their geometric mean spectra with those of matching samples of QSOs without absorbers in their spectra. There is clear evidence for the presence of dust in the intervening absorbers. The 2175 A feature is not present in the extinction curves, for any of the sub-samples. The extinction curves are similar to the SMC extinction curve with a rising UV extinction below 2200 A. The absorber rest frame colour excess, E(B-V), derived from the extinction curves, depends on the absorber properties and ranges from < 0.001 to 0.085 for various sub-samples. The column densities of several ions do not show such a correspondingly large variation. The depletion pattern is similar to halo clouds in the Galaxy. Assuming an SMC gas-to-dust ratio we find a trend of increasing abundance with decreasing extinction; systems with N_H I \~ 10^{20} cm^{-2} show solar abundance of Zn. The large velocity spread of strong Mg II systems seems to be mimicked by weak lines of other elements. The ionization of the absorbers, in general appears to be low. QSOs with absorbers are, in general, at least three times as likely to have highly reddened spectra as compared to QSOs without any absorption systems in their spectra.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0601279,
title = {Average Extinction Curves and Relative Abundances for QSO Absorption Line Systems at 1 <= z_abs < 2},
author = {Donald G. York and Pushpa Khare and Daniel Vanden Berk and Varsha P. Kulkarni and Arlin P. S. Crotts and James T. Lauroesch and Gordon T. Richards and Donald P. Schneider and Daniel E. Welty and Yusra Alsayyad and Abhishek Kumar and Britt Lundgren and Natela Shanidze and Tristan Smith and Johnny Vanlandingham and Britt Baugher and Patrick B. Hall and Edward B. Jenkins and Brice Menard and Sandhya Rao and Jason Tumlinson and David Turnshek and Ching-Wa Yip and Jon Brinkmann},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0601279},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
38 pages, 18 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS