Primordial deuterium abundance at z=2.504 towards Q1009+2956

TL;DR

This study refines the measurement of primordial deuterium abundance at z=2.504 using high-quality quasar data, revealing contamination issues that limit precision, and combines multiple measurements to estimate the universe's baryon density.

Contribution

It provides a new D/H measurement from high signal-to-noise data and assesses its impact on cosmological parameters, highlighting contamination challenges.

Findings

Deuterium feature contaminated by low-density H I cloud

Final D/H ratio estimate with 17% uncertainty

Primordial baryon density marginally inconsistent with Planck data

Abstract

The z_abs = 2.504 Lyman Limit absorption system (LLS) towards Q1009+2956 has previously been used to estimate the primordial deuterium abundance. Since the initial measurement by Burles & Tytler, this quasar has been observed extensively with the Keck telescope, providing a substantial increase in signal-to-noise (from 60 to 147 at continuum level of Ly-alpha at z_abs=2.504). We explore a set of different models for the absorption system and find that the deuterium feature is contaminated by Ly-alpha absorption from a low column density H I cloud. This significantly limits precision to which one can estimate the D/H ratio in this LLS. Our final result for this system D/H =2.48^{+0.41}_{-0.35}*10^{-5} has the same relative uncertainty of 17% as the previous estimate by Burles & Tytler despite the far higher signal-to-noise of our dataset. A weighted mean of 13 D/H measurements available in the literature (including our result) gives the primordial deuterium abundance of (D/H)_p = (2.545 +/- 0.025)*10^{-5} and the corresponding baryon density of the Universe of Omega_b h^2 = 0.02174 +/- 0.00025 marginally inconsistent with the 2015 Planck CMB data.