Related papers: The chemical evolution of galaxies causing damped …
The galaxy giving rise to the damped Ly$\alpha$ absorbing system in the QSO OI 363 with z=0.221 has been found. A galaxy which is probably associated with the second DLA in this same QSO at z=0.0912 has also been found. Neither galaxy is…
The measurement of chemical abundances in planetary nebulae in nearby galaxies is now relatively straightforward. The challenge is to use these chemical abundances to infer the chemical evolution of their host galaxies. At this point, our…
We report a quantitative study of the escape of Lyman-alpha photons from an inhomogeneous optically thick medium that mimics the structure of damped Lyman-alpha absorbers. Modeling the optically thick disk with 3 components (massive stars…
The local power law relationship between the surface densities of neutral hydrogen gas and star formation rate (SFR) can be used to explore the SFR properties of damped Lyman alpha (DLA) systems at higher redshift. We find that while the…
Using the redshift evolution of the neutral hydrogen density, as inferred from observations of damped Ly$\alpha$ clouds, we calculate the evolution of star formation rates and elemental abundances in the universe. For most observables our…
This study focuses on some of the most metal-poor damped Lyman alpha absorbers known in the spectra of high redshift QSOs, using new and archival observations obtained with UV-sensitive echelle spectrographs on the Keck and VLT telescopes.…
The mean metallicity of the thick disk of the Galaxy is 0.5 dex higher than that of the damped Lyman alpha systems. This has been interpreted to argue that stars in the former do not arise out of gas in the latter. Using new metallicity and…
We investigated abundance ratios along the profiles of six high-redshift Damped Lyman-alpha systems, three of them associated with H2 absorption, and derived optical depths in each velocity pixel. The variations of the pixel abundance…
The predictions of the multiple burst accretion model of chemical evolution are compared to the observations of the stellar masses and metallicities of star-forming galaxies. With the addition of one parameter, the model can account for the…
I summarize current knowledge of galaxy formation with emphasis on the initial conditions provided by the Lambda CDM cosmology, integral constraints from cosmological quantities, and the demographics of high-redshift protogalaxies. Tables…
An accurate method to measure the abundance of high-redshift galaxies consists in the observation of absorbers along the line of sight toward a background quasar. Here, we present abundance measurements of 13 z>3 sub-Damped Lyman-alpha…
In this paper, we investigate the star formation and chemical evolution of damped Lyman-$\alpha$ systems (DLAs) based on the disc galaxy formation model which is developed by Mo, Mao & White. We propose that the DLAs are the central…
The gas-phase and stellar metallicities have proven to be important parameters to constrain the star formation history of galaxies. However, HII regions associated with recent star-formation may not have abundances typical for the galaxy as…
Sub-damped Lyman-alpha systems (sub-DLAs) have previously been found to exhibit a steeper metallicity evolution than the classical damped Lyman-alpha systems (DLAs), evolving to close to solar metallicity by z~1. From new high-resolution…
Lyman-$\alpha$ (Ly$\alpha$) emitting galaxies are powerful tools to probe the late stages of cosmic reionization. The observed sudden drop in Ly$\alpha$ fraction at $z>6$ is often interpreted as a sign of reionization, since the…
The determination of chemical abundances in star-forming galaxies and the study of their evolution on cosmological timescales are powerful tools for understanding galaxy formation and evolution. This contribution presents the latest results…
Initial conditions are set by Big bang nucleosynthesis from which we know that 90 per cent of baryons are dark and have essentially unknown chemical composition. In our own Galaxy, there are many clues from individual stars in different…
In the context of the concordance cosmology, structure formation in the Universe is the result of the amplification, by gravitational effects, of small perturbations in the primeval density field. This results in the formation of structures…
We use cosmological smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of the Lambda cold dark matter (CDM) model to study the abundance of damped Lyman-alpha absorbers (DLAs) in the redshift range z=0-4.5. We compute the cumulative DLA…
We identify a strong Ly-alpha damping wing profile in the spectrum of the quasar P183+05 at z=6.4386. Given the detection of several narrow metal absorption lines at z=6.40392, the most likely explanation for the absorption profile is that…