English

The clustering of galaxies around three damped Ly-alpha absorbers at Redshift Three

Astrophysics 2009-11-10 v2

Abstract

[Abridged] We present out results on the cross-correlation of Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) around three damped \Ly absorbers (DLAs) at redshift three from deep multi-band MOSAIC images obtained at the KPNO 4m. The large area of the MOSAIC images, 0.31 deg2\deg^2 allows us to probe the clustering of LBGs on scales up to 20 Mpc co-moving to test whether DLA halos are more or less massive than LBG halos. . We present our survey that covers a total of 1 deg2^2 and contains \sim3,000 LBGs with photometric redshifts between 2.8 and 3.5. Within a redshift slice of width Wz=0.15W_z=0.15, we find that the DLA-LBG cross-correlation is 1.6±1.31.6\pm 1.3 times the LBG-LBG autocorrelation. This corresponds to a correlation length of ro=5±4.5h1r_o=5\pm4.5h^{-1} (co-moving). The cross-correlation is most significant on scales 5-10 Mpc, and is significantly greater than zero at the >95>95% level from Monte Carlo simulations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0403544,
  title  = {The clustering of galaxies around three damped Ly-alpha absorbers at Redshift Three},
  author = {Nicolas Bouche and James D. Lowenthal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0403544},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

14 pages, 7 Figures, To appear in ApJ, July 10, 2004, minor changes to match the accepted version