Discovery of Hydrogen Fluoride in the Cloverleaf Quasar at z = 2.56
Abstract
We report the first detection of hydrogen fluoride (HF) toward a high redshift quasar. Using the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO) we detect the HF J = 1 - 0 transition in absorption toward the Cloverleaf, a broad absorption line (BAL) quasi-stellar object (QSO) at z=2.56. The detection is statistically significant at the ~ 6 sigma level. We estimate a lower limit of 4 \times 1014 cm-2 for the HF column density and using a previous estimate of the hydrogen column density, we obtain a lower limit of 1.7 \times 10-9 for the HF abundance. This value suggests that, assuming a Galactic N(HF)/NH ratio, HF accounts for at least ~10% of the fluorine in the gas phase along the line of sight to the Cloverleaf quasar. This observation corroborates the prediction that HF should be a good probe of the molecular gas at high redshift. Measurements of the HF abundance as a function of redshift are urgently needed to better constrain the fluorine nucleosynthesis mechanism(s).
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1201.4882,
title = {Discovery of Hydrogen Fluoride in the Cloverleaf Quasar at z = 2.56},
author = {R. R. Monje and T. G. Phillips and R. Peng and D. C. Lis and D. A. Neufeld and M. Emprechtinger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1201.4882},
year = {2012}
}