Dust-depletion sequences in damped Lyman-{\alpha} absorbers: a unified picture from low-metallicity systems to the Galaxy

Understand

We study metal depletion due to dust in the interstellar medium (ISM) to infer the properties of dust grains and characterize the metal and dust content of galaxies, down to low metallicity and intermediate redshift z.

• We provide metal column densities and abundances of a sample of 70 damped Lyman-{\alpha} absorbers (DLAs) towards quasars, observed at high spectral resolution with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES).
• This is the largest sample of phosphorus abundances measured in DLAs so far.
• We use literature measurements for Galactic clouds to cover the high-metallicity end.