Characterizing the abundance, properties, and kinematics of the cool circumgalactic medium of galaxies in absorption with SDSS DR16

Understand

In order to study the circumgalactic medium (CGM) of galaxies we develop an automated pipeline to estimate the optical continuum of quasars and detect intervening metal absorption line systems with a matched kernel convolution technique and adaptive S/N criteria.

• We process $\sim$ one million quasars in the latest Data Release 16 (DR16) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and compile a large sample of $\sim$ 160,000 MgII absorbers, together with $\sim$ 70,000 FeII systems, in the redshift range $0.35<z_{abs}<2.3$.
• Combining these with the SDSS DR16 spectroscopy of $\sim1.1$ million luminous red galaxies (LRGs) and $\sim 200,000$ emission line galaxies (ELGs), we investigate the nature of cold gas absorption at $0.5<z<1$.
• These large samples allow us to characterize the scale dependence of MgII with greater accuracy than in previous work.