ATCA search for 21 cm emission from a candidate damped Ly-$\alpha$ absorber at z = 0.101

Abstract

We report a deep search for 21 cm emission/absorption from the $z\sim 0.101$ candidate damped Lyman-$\alpha$ system towards PKS 0439-433, using the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA). The spectrum shows a weak absorption feature --- at the $3.3\sigma$ level --- which yields a lower limit of 730 K on the spin temperature of the system. No HI emission was detected: the $3\sigma$ upper limit on the HI mass of the absorber is $2.25\times 10^9{M}_{\odot }$, for a velocity spread of $\sim 70$ km s${}^{-1}$. The low HI mass and the high spin temperature seem to rule out the possibility that the absorber is a large gas-rich spiral galaxy.

5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted by Astronomy and Astrophysics

References in corpus (1)

• Implications of 21cm observations for damped Ly-$\alpha$ systems

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