Detecting Damped Lyman-$\alpha$ Absorbers with Gaussian Processes

Understand

We develop an automated technique for detecting damped Lyman-$\alpha$ absorbers (DLAs) along spectroscopic lines of sight to quasi-stellar objects (QSOs or quasars).

• The detection of DLAs in large-scale spectroscopic surveys such as SDSS-III sheds light on galaxy formation at high redshift, showing the nucleation of galaxies from diffuse gas.
• We use nearly 50 000 QSO spectra to learn a novel tailored Gaussian process model for quasar emission spectra, which we apply to the DLA detection problem via Bayesian model selection.
• We propose models for identifying an arbitrary number of DLAs along a given line of sight.