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Redshifted molecular absorption systems towards PKS1830-211 and B0218+357: submillimeter CO, CI and H2O data

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 Added by Dominic Benford
 Publication date 1997
  fields Physics
and research's language is English
 Authors M. Gerin




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We have detected the J=4-3 rotational transition of 12CO in absorption at z=0.89 towards the quasar PKS1830-211, but not the 12CO 5-4 or the 3P1-3P0 fine structure line of neutral carbon. The intervening molecular medium thus has a total 12CO column density of N(CO)~2x10^18 cm^-2, which corresponds to the large column density of molecular hydrogen of N(H2)=2.5x10^22 cm^-2 and a reddening of Av=25 magnitudes. The 12CO excitation temperature is low, below 15 K. Comparison with the molecular absorption results of Wiklind and Combes (1996) shows that the absorbing material has similar molecular abundances to Galactic dark clouds. We find an upper limit for atomic carbon of N(CI)<10^18 cm^-2, which again would be the case for most Galactic dark clouds. We also report new observations of the absorbing system towards B0218+357 at z=0.68. We have tentatively detected the 13CO 4-3 line, but for H2O, although a feature is seen at the correct velocity, due to the inadequate signal to noise ratio we report only an upper limit for the fundamental line of ortho water vapor. The tentative detection of the 13CO J=4-3 line implies that the 13CO excitation temperature is lower than 20K and the column density is fairly large, N(13CO)~10^17 cm^-2, giving rise to saturated absorption in the J=2-1 transition. The total column density of molecular gas is again large in this source, N(H2)>2x10^22 cm^-2, corresponding to a reddening >20 magnitudes.



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Methanol is an important tracer to probe physical and chemical conditions in the interstellar medium of galaxies. Methanol is also the most sensitive target molecule for probing potential space-time variations of the proton-electron mass ratio, mu, a dimensionless constant of nature. We present an extensive ALMA study of the strongest submillimeter absorption lines of methanol [...] in the z=0.89 molecular absorber toward PKS1830-211, the only high-redshift object in which methanol has been detected. Our goals are to constrain the excitation of the methanol lines and to investigate the cosmological invariance of mu based on their relative kinematics. [...] We explore methanol excitation by running the non local thermal equilibrium radiative transfer code RADEX [...] The excitation analysis points to a cool (~10-20 K) and dense (~10^{4-5} cm-3) methanol gas. [...] In addition, we measure an abundance ratio A/E = 1.0 +/- 0.1, an abundance ratio CH3OH/H2 ~ 2 x 10^{-8}, and a 12CH3OH/13CH3OH ratio 62 +/- 3. Our analysis shows that the bulk velocities of the different transitions are primarily correlated with the observing epoch due to morphological changes in the background quasars emission. There is a weaker correlation between bulk velocities and the lower level energies of the transitions, which could be a signature of temperature-velocity gradients in the absorbing gas. As a result, we do not find evidence for variations of mu, and we estimate Dmu/mu = (-1.8 +/- 1.2) x 10^{-7} at 1sigma from our multivariate linear regression. We set a robust upper limit | Dmu/mu | < 3.6 x 10^{-7} (3sigma) for the invariance of mu at a look-back time of half the present age of the Universe. Our analysis highlights that systematics need to be carefully taken into account in future radio molecular absorption studies aimed at testing Dmu/mu below the 10^{-7} horizon. (Abridged)
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