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Quasar absorbers provide a powerful observational tool with which to probe both galaxies and the intergalactic medium up to high redshift. We present a study of the evolution of the column density distribution, f(N,z), and total neutral hydrogen mass in high-column density quasar absorbers using data from a recent high-redshift survey for damped Lyman-alpha (DLA) and Lyman limit system (LLS) absorbers. Whilst in the redshift range 2 to 3.5, ~90% of the neutral HI mass is in DLAs, we find that at z>3.5 this fraction drops to only 55% and that the remaining missing mass fraction of the neutral gas lies in sub-DLAs with N(HI) 10^{19} - 2 * 10^{20} cm^{-2}.
We present the first search for galaxy counterparts of intervening high-z (2<z< 3.6) sub-DLAs and DLAs towards GRBs. Our final sample comprises of five intervening sub-DLAs and DLAs in four GRB fields. To identify candidate galaxy counterparts of the
We present the results of a systematic search for molecular hydrogen (H2) in low redshift ($ 0.05 lesssim z lesssim 0.7$) DLAs and sub-DLAs with $N(HI) gtrsim 10^{19.0}$ cm$^{-2}$, in the archival HST/COS spectra. Our core sample is comprised of 27 s
Damped Lyman-alpha systems (DLAs) are useful probes of star formation and galaxy formation at high redshift. We study the physical properties of DLAs and their relationship to Lyman-break galaxies using cosmological hydrodynamic simulations based on
We use simple models of the spatial structure of the quasar broad line region (BLR) to investigate the properties of so-called ghostly damped Lyman-{alpha} (DLA) systems detected in SDSS data. These absorbers are characterized by the presence of stro
In this first paper of a series, we report on the use of quasar spectra obtained with the UVES high resolution spectrograph and available through the ESO VLT archive to build the first sample of sub-DLA systems, absorbers with HI column densities > 1