AAS 201st Meeting, January, 2003
Session 98. AGNs, Black Holes, and Quasars
Oral, Wednesday, January 8, 2003, 10:00-11:30am, 616-617

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[98.07] Far-Infrared Line Emission from High Redshift Quasars

D.J. Benford (NASA / GSFC), P. Cox (IAS), T.R. Hunter (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA), S. Malhotra (STScI), T.G. Phillips (Caltech), M.S. Yun (U. Mass, Amherst)

Recent millimeter and submillimeter detections of line emission in high redshift objects have yielded new information and constraints on star formation at early epochs. Only CO transitions and atomic carbon transitions have been detected from these objects, yet bright far-infrared lines such as C+ at 158 microns and N+ at 205 microns should be fairly readily detectable when redshifted into a submillimeter atmospheric window. We have obtained upper limits for C+ emission from two high redshift quasars, BR1202-0725 at z=4.69 and BRI1335-0415 at z=4.41. These limits show that the ratio of the C+ line luminosity to the total far-infrared luminosity is less than 0.01%, ten times smaller than has been observed locally. Additionally, we have searched for emission in the N+ 205 micron line from the Cloverleaf quasar, H1413+117, and detected emission in CO J=7-6. The N+ emission is found to be below the amount predicted based on comparison to the only previous detection of this line, in the starburst galaxy M82.


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: dominic.benford@gsfc.nasa.gov

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