Prospecting for C IV at high redshifts
As the light from these distant objects propagates towards us, it encounters metals in the intervening IGM that superimpose absorption lines on the quasar’s spectra. By looking for metal absorption lines in the spectra of high redshifts quasars, we can learn about the metal content of the IGM. This paper by Simcoe et al. considers the spectra of 7 quasars with redshifts greater than 5.5. The moderate-resolution, near-infrared spectra were obtained over the past year with the FIRE spectrograph.
