Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Testing Cosmological Models Against The Abundance Of Damped Lyman-Alpha Absorbers, Jp Gardner, N Katz, Dh Weinberg, L Hernquist

Astronomy Department Faculty Publication Series

We calculate the number of damped Lyα absorbers expected in various popular cosmological models as a function of redshift and compare our predictions with observed abundances. The Press-Schechter formalism is used to obtain the distribution of halos with circular velocity in different cosmologies, and we calibrate the relation between circular velocity and absorption cross section using detailed gasdynamical simulations of a standard cold dark matter (CDM) model. Because of this calibration, our approach makes more realistic assumptions about the absorption properties of collapsed objects than previous, analytic calculations of the damped Lyα abundance. CDM models with Ω₀ = 1, …