Related papers: Quasistellar Objects: Intervening Absorption Lines
Spectra of quasars result primarily from interactions of natural light with atomic hydrogen. A visible absorption of a sharp and saturated spectral line in a gas requires a low pressure, so a long path without blushing as a cosmological…
Studies of damped Lyman-alpha absorption systems in quasar spectra are yielding very interesting results regarding the chemical evolution of these galaxies. We present some preliminary results from such a program.
We report preliminary results from a targeted investigation on quasars containing damped Lyman-alpha absorption (DLA) lines as well strong metal absorption lines, carried out with the Potsdam Multi Aperture Spectrophotometer (PMAS). We…
We analyzed the absorption line spectra of all quasars observed with the high resolution gratings of the Faint Object Spectrograph on board the Hubble Space Telescope. We examined 788 spectra for 334 quasars, and present line lists and…
Broad absorption lines (BALs) in quasar spectra identify high velocity outflows that likely exist in all quasars and could play a major role in feedback to galaxy evolution. Studying the variability in these BALs can help us understand the…
Line locking (LL) of absorption line systems is a clear signature of the dynamical importance of radiation pressure force in driving astrophysical flows, with recent findings suggesting that it may be common in quasars exhibiting multiple…
This paper proposes a simple, empirically derived, unifying structure for the inner regions of quasars. This structure is constructed to explain the broad absorption line (BAL) regions, the narrow `associated' ultraviolet and X-ray warm…
Groups and clusters of galaxies hosting a quasar can be found through the detection of Lyman-alpha absorption lines beyond the quasar redshift. The effect occurs whenever the distortion to the redshift distribution of Lyman-alpha clouds…
We present results from a search for galaxies that give rise to damped Lyman alpha (DLA), subDLA, and Lyman limit system (LLS) absorption at redshifts 0.1 ~< z ~< 1 in the spectra of background quasars. The sample was formed from a larger…
Lyman-alpha absorption is a prominent cosmological tool for probing both galactic halos and the intergalactic medium at high redshift. We consider a variety of sources that can be used as the Lyman-alpha emitters for this purpose. Among…
Correlations in and with the flux transmission of the Lyman$-\alpha$ (Ly$\alpha$) forest in the spectra of high-redshift quasars are powerful cosmological tools, yet these measurements can be compromised if the intrinsic quasar continuum is…
Roughly 10% of all quasars exhibit Broad Absorption Line (BAL) features which appear to arise in material outflowing at high velocity from the active galactic nucleus (AGN). The details of this outflow are, however, very poorly constrained…
The origin and evolution of structure in the Universe is one of the major questions occupying astronomers today. An understanding of the Lyalpha absorbers seen in QSO spectra is an important part of this program since such absorbers can be…
Although quasar absorbers, and in particular Damped Lyman-alpha systems (DLAs) have proven a valuable tool to study the early Universe, their exact nature is so far poorly constrained. It has been suggested that outflows in galaxies might…
It is possible to distinguish ``intrinsic'' absorption systems (gas clouds within the quasar environment) from ``intervening'' systems (gas clouds unrelated to the quasar phenomenon) by considering certain observational properties. We find…
With close pairs of quasars at different redshifts, a background quasar sightline can be used to study a foreground quasar's environment in absorption. We used a sample of 17 Lyman limit systems with column density N_HI > 10^19 cm^-2…
We present high signal-to-noise, 5 A resolution (FWHM) spectra of 66 z \ga 4 bright quasars obtained with the 4 m Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory and 4.2 m William Hershel telescopes. The primary goal of these observations was to…
The APM multicolor survey for bright z > 4 objects, covering 2500 deg^2 of sky to m(R)~19, resulted in the discovery of thirty-one quasars with z > 4. High signal-to-noise optical spectrophotometry at 5A resolution has been obtained for the…
We present a brief overview of the ongoing Complete Optical and Radio Absorption Line System (CORALS) survey. We review the results of our survey for z>2.2 damped Lyman alpha systems (DLAs) and present the preliminary results of an extended…
We statistically study the physical properties of a sample of narrow absorption line (NAL) systems looking for empirical evidences to distinguish between intrinsic and intervening NALs without taking into account any a priori definition or…