English

Where has all the neutral hydrogen gone?

Astrophysics 2016-01-27 v1

Abstract

Our extremely deep survey for extragalactic HI (HIDEEP) finds no intergalactic gas clouds, and no galaxies with HI at inferred global column-densities below 10^20 cm^-2 when we could have detected such objects down to a completeness limit of 4 x 10^18 cm^-2. We speculate that low surface-density hydrogen is either ionised or locked up in ``frozen discs'', i.e. structures where the local Ly-alpha is insufficient to excite the 21-cm transition to a spin-temperature above the cosmic background. Such ``frozen discs'' might be responsible for many QSOALSs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0211288,
  title  = {Where has all the neutral hydrogen gone?},
  author = {M. J. Disney and R. F. Minchin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0211288},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

6 pages, 3 figures, to be published in the proceedings of "The IGM/Galaxy Connection"

R2 v1 2026-07-22T08:17:06.551Z