The Origins and Environments of Quasar Absorption Lines in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Owing to the advent of large spectroscopic surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), tens of thousands of quasar absorption line (QAL) systems have been identified to date. QAL catalogs currently extend to z &sim; 4.6 and provide unique probes of the large scale structure of baryonic matter in the high-redshift universe; yet many critical questions regarding the origins and environments of QALs still remain. Absorption along the line of sight to quasars is believed to probe a wide variety of physical processes, including relativistic quasar outflows, star-forming regions in galactic disks, and virialized gas in extended galaxy haloes. Although progress has been made in observationally differentiating the physical phenomena producing absorption in individual systems, high-resolution spectroscopy has generally been required for such work, and such observations are expensive to obtain in large quantities. Only recently has the vast dataset of the SDSS provided the means to disentangle some observational degeneracies in quasar absorption line studies statistically.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign