Wednesday, January 25, 2012

1201.4882 (R. R. Monje et al.)

Discovery of Hydrogen Fluoride in the Cloverleaf Quasar at z = 2.56    [PDF]

R. R. Monje, T. G. Phillips, R. Peng, D. C. Lis, D. A. Neufeld, M. Emprechtinger
We report the first detection of hydrogen fluoride (HF) toward a high redshift quasar. Using the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO) we detect the HF J = 1 - 0 transition in absorption toward the Cloverleaf, a broad absorption line (BAL) quasi-stellar object (QSO) at z=2.56. The detection is statistically significant at the ~ 6 sigma level. We estimate a lower limit of 4 \times 1014 cm-2 for the HF column density and using a previous estimate of the hydrogen column density, we obtain a lower limit of 1.7 \times 10-9 for the HF abundance. This value suggests that, assuming a Galactic N(HF)/NH ratio, HF accounts for at least ~10% of the fluorine in the gas phase along the line of sight to the Cloverleaf quasar. This observation corroborates the prediction that HF should be a good probe of the molecular gas at high redshift. Measurements of the HF abundance as a function of redshift are urgently needed to better constrain the fluorine nucleosynthesis mechanism(s).
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.4882

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