The galaxy counterpart and environment of the dusty Damped Lyman-alpha Absorber at z=2.226 towards Q1218+0832

Abstract

We report on further observations of the field of the quasar Q1218+0832. Geier et al. 2019 presented the discovery of the quasar resulting from a search for quasars reddened and dimmed by dust in foreground damped Lyman-alpha absorbers (DLAs). The DLA is remarkable by having a very large HI column density close to 10^22 cm^-2 . Its dust extinction curve shows the 2175 AA bump known from the Local Group. It also shows absorption from cold gas exemplified by CI and CO molecules. For this paper, we present narrow-band observations of the field of Q1218+0832 and also use an archival Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image to search for the galaxy counterpart of the DLA. No emission from the DLA galaxy is found in either the narrow-band imaging or in the HST image. In the HST image, we could probe down to an impact parameter of 0.3 arcsec and a 3-sigma detection limit of 26.8 mag per arcsec^2. In the narrow-band image, we probed down to a 0 arcsec impact parameter and detected nothing down to a 3-sigma detection limit of about 3x10-17 erg s^-1 cm^-2 . We did detect a bright Lyman-alpha emitter 59 arcsec south of Q1218+0832 with a flux of 3x10^-16 erg s^-1 cm^-2 . We conclude that the DLA galaxy must be located at a very small impact parameter (<0.3 arcsec, 2.5 kpc) or it is optically dark. Also, the DLA galaxy most likely is part of a galaxy group.

9 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in A&A. Corrections from the proofs have been added

References in corpus (23)

• On the (Non)Evolution of HI Disks over Cosmic Time
• The Cosmic Baryon and Metal Cycles
• Velocity-Metallicity Correlation for high-z DLA Galaxies: Evidence for a Mass-Metallicity Relation?
• A Population of Faint Extended Line Emitters and the Host Galaxies of Optically Thick QSO Absorption Systems
• The Neutral Hydrogen Cosmological Mass Density at z=5
• Reconciling the Metallicity Distributions of Gamma-ray Burst, Damped Lyman-alpha, and Lyman-break Galaxies at z=3
• Galaxy Counterparts of metal-rich Damped Lyman-alpha Absorbers - I: The case of the z=2.35 DLA towards Q2222-0946
• Damped Lyman-alpha absorbers as a probe of stellar feedback
• Lyman alpha Radiative Transfer in Cosmological Simulations using Adaptive Mesh Refinement
• The UCSD Radio-Selected Quasar Survey for Damped Lyman alpha System
• The SDSS-DR12 large-scale cross-correlation of Damped Lyman Alpha Systems with the Lyman Alpha Forest
• Metal-enriched halo gas across galaxy overdensities over the last 10 billion years
• MUSE Analysis of Gas around Galaxies (MAGG) -- IV: The gaseous environment of $z\sim$ 3-4 Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies
• Linking gas and galaxies at high redshift: MUSE surveys the environments of six damped Lyman alpha galaxies at z~3
• On the mass-metallicity relation, velocity dispersion and gravitational well depth of GRB host galaxies
• ALMA + VLT observations of a Damped Lyman-α absorbing galaxy: Massive, wide CO emission, gas-rich but with very low SFR
• The effect of dust bias on the census of neutral gas and metals in the high-redshift Universe due to SDSS-II quasar colour selection
• A successful search for intervening 21 cm HI absorption in galaxies at 0.4 < z <1.0 with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP)
• High Molecular Gas Masses in Absorption-selected Galaxies at $z\approx 2$
• The high A_V Quasar Survey: A z=2.027 metal-rich damped Lyman-alpha absorber towards a red quasar at z=3.21
• High-redshift Damped Ly-alpha Absorbing Galaxy Model Reproducing the N(HI)-Z Distribution
• Gaia-assisted selection of a quasar reddened by dust in an extremely-strong Damped Lyman-α Absorber at z=2.226
• Modeling the Statistics of the Cold Neutral Medium in Absorption-selected High-redshift Galaxies

Cited by in corpus (1)

• A [CII]-158-micron Survey of DLA galaxies at z~4: Observations of Dense and Metal-Enriched Neutral Gas within the Circumgalactic Medium of Star-Forming Galaxies