Average [O II] nebular emission associated with Mg II absorbers: Dependence on Fe II absorption

We investigate the effect of Fe II equivalent width ($W_{2600}$) and fibre size on the average luminosity of [O II]$lambdalambda$3727,3729 nebular emission associated with Mg II absorbers (at $0.55 le z le 1.3$) in the composite spectra of quasars obtained with 3 and 2 arcsec fibres in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We confirm the presence of strong correlations between [O II] luminosity (L$_{[rm O~II]}$) and equivalent width ($W_{2796}$) and redshift of Mg II absorbers. However, we show L$_{[rm O~II]}$ and average luminosity surface density suffers from fibre size effects. More importantly, for a given fibre size the average L$_{[rm O~II]}$ strongly depends on the equivalent width of Fe II absorption lines and found to be higher for Mg II absorbers with $R equiv$ $W_{rm 2600}/W_{rm 2796}$ $ge 0.5$. In fact, we show the observed strong correlations of L$_{[rm O~II]}$ with $W_{2796}$ and $z$ of Mg II absorbers are mainly driven by such systems. Direct [O II] detections also confirm the link between L$_{[rm O~II]}$ and $R$. Therefore, one has to pay attention to the fibre losses and dependence of redshift evolution of Mg II absorbers on $W_{2600}$ before using them as a luminosity unbiased probe of global star formation rate density. We show that the [O II] nebular emission detected in the stacked spectrum is not dominated by few direct detections (i.e., detections $ge 3 sigma$ significant level). On an average the systems with $R$ $ge 0.5$ and $W_{2796}$ $ge 2$ AA are more reddened, showing colour excess E($B-V$) $sim$ 0.02, with respect to the systems with $R$ $< 0.5$ and most likely traces the high H I column density systems.