Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 428, Issue 3, Pages 2053-2063Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/sts171
Keywords
galaxies: active; galaxies: high redshift; quasars: absorption lines; galaxies: stellar content; radio lines: galaxies; ultraviolet: galaxies
Categories
Funding
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- [CE110001020]
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Unlike at lower redshift, where there is a 40 per cent detection rate, surveys for 21-cm absorption arising within the hosts of z greater than or similar to 1 radio galaxies and quasars have been remarkably unsuccessful. Curran et al. (2008) suggest that this is due to the high-redshift selection biasing towards the most optically bright objects [those most luminous in the ultraviolet (UV) in the rest-frame], where the gas is ionized by the active galactic nucleus. They therefore argue that there must be a population of fainter objects in which the hydrogen is not ionized and which exhibit a similar detection rate as at lower redshifts. In order to find this 'missing' gas at high redshift, we have therefore undertaken a survey of z greater than or similar to 2 radio sources, selected by optical faintness. Despite having optical magnitudes which indicate that the targets have UV luminosities below the threshold where all of the gas is ionized, there were no detections in any of the eight sources for which useable data were obtained. Upon an analysis of the spectral energy distributions, ionizing photon rates can only be determined for three of these, all of which suggest that the objects are above the highest luminosity of a current 21-cm detection. The possibility that the other five could be located at lower photon rates cannot be ruled out, although zero detections out of five are not statistically significant. Another possible cause of the non-detections is that our selection biases the sample towards sources which are very steep in the radio band, with a mean spectral index of = -1.0, cf. -0.3 for both the 21-cm detections and UV luminous non-detections. This adds the further possibility that the sources have very extended emission, which would have the effect of reducing the coverage by the putative absorbing gas, thus decreasing the sensitivity of the observation.
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