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D. G. York (Univ. of ChicagoSD), SDSS Collaboration
About 100,000 spectra of QSOs will be acquired during the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Many of these will have a signal-to-noise ratio high enough to allow detection of intergalactic absorption lines. The first results for 69 QSOs will be presented, along with the line fitting techniques and the line identification techniques, based on the spectra of resolving power 1800. Among the chief goals are the determination of relationships between apparent intergalactic lines and QSO properties (that is, determination of the fraction of systems that are likely to be circum QSO, at high ejection velocity); the use of an unbiased sample to derive better statistics than are now available; and the determination of abundances for a wide range of redshifts in the same species, possible because of the large spectral coverage. Eventually, a very large sample is expected to lead to studies of absorption line clustering that can be compared with that of other populations of objects at the same redshifts as subsamples of the QSO absorption line systems.
The SDSS is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, The SDSS member institutions, NASA, NSF, DOE, Monbusho and the Max Planck Society