2010

The Composite Spectrum of Strong Lyman-alpha Forest Absorbers

Pieri, Matthew M., Frank, Stephan, Weinberg, David H. et al.

Understand

We present a new method for probing the physical conditions and metal enrichment of the Intergalactic Medium: the composite spectrum of Ly-alpha forest absorbers.

We apply this technique to a sample of 9480 Ly-alpha absorbers with redshift 2 < z < 3.5 identified in the spectra of 13,279 high-redshift quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Fifth Data Release (DR5).
Absorbers are selected as local minima in the spectra with 2.4 < tau_Ly-alpha < 4.0; at SDSS resolution (~ 150km/s FWHM), these absorbers are blends of systems that are individually weaker.
In the stacked spectra we detect seven Lyman-series lines and metal lines of O VI, N V, C IV, C III, Si IV, C II, Al II, Si II, Fe II, Mg II, and O I.

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