Dust, Metals and Diffuse Interstellar Bands in Damped Lyman Alpha Systems
Astrophysics
2007-05-23 v1
Abstract
Although damped Lyman alpha (DLA) systems are usually considered metal-poor, it has been suggested that this could be due to observational bias against metal-enriched absorbers. I review recent surveys to quantify the particular issue of dust obscuration bias and demonstrate that there is currently no compelling observational evidence to support a widespread effect due to extinction. On the other hand, a small sub-set of DLAs may be metal-rich and I review some recent observations of these metal-rich absorbers and the detection of diffuse interstellar bands in one DLA at z ~ 0.5.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0609530,
title = {Dust, Metals and Diffuse Interstellar Bands in Damped Lyman Alpha Systems},
author = {Sara L. Ellison},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0609530},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
5 pages, 3 figures. To appear in proceedings of "The Metal-Rich Universe", (La Palma, June 2006), eds. G. Israelian and G. Meynet (Cambridge Univ. Press)