First Investigation of the Clustering Environment of Damped Lyman Alpha Absorbers at z=4

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  • 23 March 2001
Abstract
We report the first observations of the clustering environment of damped Lyman alpha absorption systems at z = 4. Color selection and photometric redshifts were used to identify 46 candidate Lyman-break galaxies from deep BRI images of the field containing the quasar BR 0951-04. Spectroscopic confirmation of 10 Lyman-break galaxies indicates that half of this population may be missed by color selection alone at z = 4. Both of the galaxies found within 15'' of the QSO line-of-sight appear to be correlated with absorption systems in the quasar spectrum. However, we see no measurable clustering of Lyman-break galaxies with the damped Ly alpha absorbers. With a larger sample of galaxies, our method should determine the cross-correlation between these objects, which probes the bias and hence the mass of the damped Ly alpha absorbers. We describe an ongoing observational program designed to obtain better statistics as an empirical constraint upon models of galaxy formation.

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