A Homogeneous Sample of Sub-DLAs IV: Global Metallicity Evolution

TL;DR

This study measures metallicity evolution in high-redshift sub-DLAs, revealing they contribute minimally to the universe's metal content and do not resolve the missing metals problem.

Contribution

It provides new high-resolution metallicity measurements for z>3 sub-DLAs and assesses their role in cosmic metal enrichment, which was previously underexplored.

Findings

Sub-DLAs show stronger metallicity evolution than classical DLAs.

Sub-DLAs contribute no more than 6% of metals at z~2.5.

Sub-DLAs are insufficient to solve the missing metals problem.

Abstract

An accurate method to measure the abundance of high-redshift galaxies consists in the observation of absorbers along the line of sight toward a background quasar. Here, we present abundance measurements of 13 z>3 sub-Damped Lyman-alpha Systems (quasar absorbers with HI column density 19 < log N(HI) < 20.3 cm^-2) based on the high resolution observations with VLT UVES spectrograph. These observations more than double the metallicity information for sub-DLAs previously available at z>3. This new data, combined with other sub-DLA measurements from the literature, confirm the stronger metallicity redshift evolution than for the classical Damped Lyman-alpha absorbers. Besides, these observations are used to compute for the first time the fraction of gas ionised from photo-ionisation modelling in a sample of sub-DLAs. Based on these results, we calculate that sub-DLAs contribute no more than 6% of the expected amount of metals at z~2.5. We therefore conclude that even if sub-DLAs are found to be more metal-rich than classical DLAs, they are insufficient to close the so-called ``missing metals problem''.