Related papers: Implications for optical identifications of QSO ab…
Galactic destruction of primordial deuterium is inevitably linked through star formation to the chemical evolution of the Galaxy. The relatively high present gas content and low metallicity suggest only modest D-destruction. In concert with…
We present photometric and spectroscopic measurements of 53 QSO-galaxy pairs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, where nebular emission lines from a 0<z<0.84 foreground galaxy are detected in the fiber spectra of a background QSO, bringing…
Damped Lyman-alpha absorbers are believed to be associated with galactic disks. We show that gravitational lensing can therefore affect the statistics of these systems. First, the magnification bias due to lensing raises faint QSOs above a…
Abundance histories for QSO absorption line systems as a function of redshift are presented for all metals lighter than gallium. Coupling various conventional cosmological models with a simple, first--order model for the chemical evolution…
We present deep ground based imaging of the environments of five QSOs that contain sub-Damped Lyman-alpha systems at z<1 with the SOAR telescope and SOI camera. We detect a clear surplus of galaxies in these small fields, supporting the…
The analysis of absorption features along the line of sight to distant sources is an invaluable tool for observational cosmology, giving a direct insight into the physical and chemical state of the inter/circumgalactic medium. Such…
We present details regarding the construction of a composite spectrum of quasar (QSO) absorption line systems. In this composite spectrum we identify more than 70 absorption lines, and observe oxygen and hydrogen emission features at a…
In contradiction to the simple AGN unification schemes, there exists a significant population of broad line, z~2 QSOs which have heavily absorbed X-ray spectra. These objects have luminosities and redshifts characteristic of the sources…
Aims. Falomo et al. (2005) discovered a disk-like galaxy at ~ 1.2 arcsec from the QSO Q0045-3337 by means of ESO VLT adaptive optics. They estimated a galaxy Einstein radius (for a point mass) of comparable size, thus pointing up the…
We review observations of molecular absorption line systems at high redshift toward red quasars and gravitational lenses.
As a tool to interpret nearby and high redshift galaxy data from optical to K-band we present our chemically consistent spectrophotometric evolutionary synthesis models. These models take into account the increasing initial metallicity of…
Using simulations of the low redshift galaxy population based upon galaxy observations, it is shown (Linder 1998) that the majority of Ly$\alpha$ absorbers at low redshift could arise in low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies. The…
Over the last decades, evolutionary population synthesis models have powered an unmatched leap forward in our understanding of galaxies. From dating the age of the first galaxies in the Universe to detailed measurements of the chemical…
We present a model for the Lyman-alpha absorbers that treats all objects (from the low-density forest clouds to the dense damped systems) in a unified description. This approach is consistent with an earlier model of galaxies (luminosity…
The combination of huge databases of galaxy spectra and advances in evolutionary synthesis models in the past few years has renewed interest in an old question: How to estimate the star formation history of a galaxy out of its integrated…
Older and more recent pieces of observational evidence suggest a strong connection between QSOs and galaxies; in particular, the recently discovered correlation between black hole and galactic bulge masses suggests that QSO activity is…
We present the first results from a study of OVI absorption around galaxies at $z<1.44$ using data from a near-infrared grism spectroscopic Hubble Space Telescope Large Program, the Quasar Sightline and Galaxy Evolution (QSAGE) survey.…
We propose a three component model consisting of minihalos and galactic halos with embedded thin discs for absorbers producing all the observed classes of intervening quasar absorption line systems. We show that this model, based on CDM…
These lectures take a look at how observations with adaptive optics (AO) are beginning to influence our understanding of active galactic nuclei (AGN). By focussing on a few specific topics, the aim is to highlight the different ways in…
We have modelled the evolution of the number of Ly_alpha absorbers with redshift, resulting from the evolution of the ionising background and the Hubble expansion. The contribution of quasars (QSOs) and galaxies to the HI-ionising UV…