The Kast Ground Based UV Spectral Survey of 79 QSOs at Redshift 2 for Lyman Alpha Forest and Metal Absorption

Abstract

We present a moderate resolution (~1.15 Angstroms/pixel) survey of 79 quasars obtained using the Kast spectrograph on the Shane 3m telescope at Lick observatory. The spectra span the wavelength range of 3175-5880 Angstroms, and have typical signal to noise of 6-20 in the regions of the spectra showing Lyman alpha forest absorption. The quasars have a mean emission redshift of z=2.17, and nearly all cover the entire Lyman alpha forest between Lyman alpha and Lyman beta. Although the quasars were selected to avoid BAL, two quasars in the survey are BAL, one of which is a new discovery. We list the HI and metal ions observed in a total of 140 absorption systems. We also identify 526 emission lines, and list their observed wavelengths, along with new redshifts of the quasars. We determine the rest wavelengths of 3 emission lines or line blends in the forest to be 1070.95 +/- 1.00, 1123.13 +/- 0.51, and 1175.88 +/- 0.30 Angstroms.

arXiv commentSubmitted to the Astronomical Journal

References in corpus (10)

• The Rest-Frame Extreme Ultraviolet Spectral Properties of QSOs
• The cosmological baryon density from the deuterium to hydrogen ratio towards QSO absorption systems: D/H towards Q1243+3047
• A Chandra Survey of Broad Absorption Line Quasars
• The power spectrum of the flux distribution in the Lyman-alpha forest of a Large sample of UVES QSO Absorption Spectra (LUQAS)
• The FIRST Bright QSO Survey
• Variability Tests for Intrinsic Absorption Lines in Quasar Spectra
• Emission Line Properties of the Large Bright Quasar Survey
• Emission-Line Properties of z > 4 Quasars
• Relative Flux Calibration of Keck HIRES Echelle Spectra
• A Uniform Analysis of the Ly-alpha forest at z = 0 - 5: I. The sample and distribution of clouds at z > 1.7

Cited by in corpus (19)

• The Physics of the Intergalactic Medium
• A Direct Precision Measurement of the Intergalactic Lyman-alpha Opacity at 2<z<4.2
• GeV Gamma-Ray Attenuation and the High-Redshift UV Background
• The thermal history of the intergalactic medium down to redshift z=1.5: a new curvature measurement
• Cosmological parameters sigma_8, the baryon density, and the UV background intensity from a calibrated measurement of H I Lyman-alpha absorption at z = 1.9
• The H I opacity of the intergalactic medium at redshifts 1.6 < z < 3.2
• Continuous statistics of the Lyman-alpha forest at 0 < z < 1.6: the mean flux, flux distribution, and autocorrelation from HST FOS spectra
• The Line-of-Sight Proximity Effect and the Mass of Quasar Host Halos
• Metal Absorption Systems in Spectra of Pairs of QSOs
• The Effect of Large-Scale Power on Simulated Spectra of the Lya forest
• A Bare Molecular Cloud at z~0.45
• The Gaseous Environments of Quasars: Associate Absorption Lines with Density and Distance Constraints
• A measurement of the Lyman-beta forest power spectrum and its cross with the Lyman-alpha forest in X-Shooter XQ-100
• Composite spectra of quasars with different UV spectral index
• Effective Opacity of the Intergalactic Medium from Galaxy Spectra Analysis
• Optical Corrections to the Veron-Cetty & Veron Quasar Catalogue
• Exploring the links between quasar winds and radio emission along the Main Sequence at high redshift
• Periodic variability of the z=2.0 quasar QSO B1312+7837
• Stochastic Absorption of the Light of Background Sources due to Intergalactic Neutral Hydrogen I. Testing different line-number evolution models via the cosmic flux decrement