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The Metallicity evolution of Damped Lyman-alpha systems

1999/12/06 by S. Savaglio, Savaglio, S., N. Panagia +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Scientific Research and Discoveries #astro-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/9912112

proceedings of the conference "Cosmic Evolution and Galaxy Formation: Structure, Interactions and Feedback", Puebla, November 1999, ASP. Conf. Series, eds. J. Franco, E. Terlevich., O. Lopez-Cruz, I. Aretxaga. This replaces the paper originally submitted to ApJL. Work is in progress on an extended version

openalex publication_date 1999/12/06 · arxiv created 2000/04/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We have collected data for 69 Damped Lyman-alpha (DLA) systems, to investigate the chemical evolution of galaxies in the redshift interval 0.0 < z < 4.4. In doing that, we have adopted the most general approach used so far to correct for dust depletion. The best solution, obtained through chi2 minimization, gives as output parameters the global DLA metallicity and the dust-to-metals ratio. Clear evolution of the metallicity vs. redshift is found (99.99% significance level), with average values going from ~1/30 solar at z~4.1 to ~3/5 solar at z~0.5. We also find that the majority of DLAs (~60%) shows dust depletion patterns which most closely resemble that of the warm halo clouds in the Milky Way, and have dust-to-metals ratios very close to warm halo clouds.

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