Metal Abundances in the Lyman Alpha Forest

Abstract

We present high S/N echelle spectra of the recently discovered ultraluminous QSO APM 08279+5255 and use these data to re-examine the abundance of Carbon in Ly alpha forest clouds. In agreement with previous work, we find that approximately half of the Ly alpha clouds whose hydrogen column densities log N(HI) > 14.5 have associated weak CIV absorption with log N(CIV) > 12, and we derive a median N(CIV)/N(H I) = 1.4 x 10^-3. We then investigate whether there is any CIV absorption in weaker Ly alpha clouds with 13.5 < log N(HI) < 14.0. Two contrasting techniques are compared - firstly by stacking individual CIV lines to produce a high S/N (=580) composite spectrum and secondly by constructing pixel-by-pixel optical depth distributions, a technique recently developed by Cowie & Songaila (1998). By simulating stacks of synthetic absorption lines, the composite spectrum technique is found to be severely hampered by random redshift offsets between CIV lines and their corresponding HI. Whilst the optical depth method showed evidence for CIV asborption even at HI optical depths as small as 0.5 - 2, simulations showed that even higher S/N ratios are required in order to determine whether the CIV/HI ratio remains constant at these low column densities.