2024/05/16 by Paul Martini, Andrei Cuceu, Martini, Paul +90 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.09737
openalex publication_date 2024/05/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Broad absorption line quasars (BALs) exhibit blueshifted absorption relative to a number of their prominent broad emission features. These absorption features can contribute to quasar redshift errors and add absorption to the Lyman-alpha (LyA) forest that is unrelated to large-scale structure. We present a detailed analysis of the impact of BALs on the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) results with the LyA forest from the first year of data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). The baseline strategy for the first year analysis is to mask all pixels associated with all BAL absorption features that fall within the wavelength region used to measure the forest. We explore a range of alternate masking strategies and demonstrate that these changes have minimal impact on the BAO measurements with both DESI data and synthetic data. This includes when we mask the BAL features associated with emission lines outside of the forest region to minimize their contribution to redshift errors. We identify differences in the properties of BALs in the synthetic datasets relative to the observational data, as well as use the synthetic observations to characterize the completeness of the BAL identification algorithm, and demonstrate that incompleteness and differences in the BALs between real and synthetic data also do not impact the BAO results for the LyA forest.