Detecting Damped Lyman-$\alpha$ Absorbers with Gaussian Processes

Abstract

We develop an automated technique for detecting damped Lyman-$\alpha$ absorbers (DLAs) along spectroscopic lines of sight to quasi-stellar objects (QSOs or quasars). The detection of DLAs in large-scale spectroscopic surveys such as SDSS-III sheds light on galaxy formation at high redshift, showing the nucleation of galaxies from diffuse gas. We use nearly 50 000 QSO spectra to learn a novel tailored Gaussian process model for quasar emission spectra, which we apply to the DLA detection problem via Bayesian model selection. We propose models for identifying an arbitrary number of DLAs along a given line of sight. We demonstrate our method's effectiveness using a large-scale validation experiment, with excellent performance. We also provide a catalog of our results applied to 162 858 spectra from SDSS-III data release 12.

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Cited by in corpus (22)

• Deep Learning of Quasar Spectra to Discover and Characterize Damped Lya Systems
• Statistical properties of damped Lyman-alpha systems from Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR12
• Constraining the H${}_2$ column density distribution at z$\sim$3 from composite DLA spectra
• The First Large Absorption Survey in HI (FLASH): I. Science Goals and Survey Design
• Damped Lyman-alpha Absorbers from Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR16Q with Gaussian processes
• How proper are Bayesian models in the astronomical literature?
• Detecting Multiple DLAs per Spectrum in SDSS DR12 with Gaussian Processes
• The Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: The Damped Lyman-$\alpha$ systems Catalog
• Quasar Factor Analysis -- An Unsupervised and Probabilistic Quasar Continuum Prediction Algorithm with Latent Factor Analysis
• Imprints of the first billion years: Lyman limit systems at $z\sim 5$
• Strong-lensing source reconstruction with variationally optimised Gaussian processes
• A statistical measurement of the HI spin temperature in DLAs at cosmological distances
• Bias of Damped Lyman-$\alpha$ systems from their cross-correlation with CMB lensing
• Testing Galaxy Formation Simulations with Damped Lyman-$\alpha$ Abundance and Metallicity Evolution
• Constraining the Halo Mass of Damped Ly$\alpha$ Absorption Systems (DLAs) at $z=2-3.5$ using the Quasar-CMB Lensing Cross-correlation
• Detecting neutral hydrogen at z > 3 in large spectroscopic surveys of quasars
• Deepest far ultraviolet view of a central field in the Coma cluster by AstroSat UVIT
• A search for cosmological anisotropy using the Lyman alpha forest from SDSS quasar spectra
• Harvesting the Lyα forest with convolutional neural networks
• Automated Measurement of Quasar Redshift with a Gaussian Process
• The Effect of Interstellar Absorption on Measurements of the Baryon Acoustic Peak in the Lyman-α Forest
• A Strange EUV Emission: Scattered Continuum in the Lymann Limit Absorption Edge toward the Quasar SDSS J125903.26+621211.5?