DESI Mg II Absorbers: Extinction Characteristics & Quasar Redshift Accuracy

TL;DR

This study investigates how Mg II absorption-line systems influence quasar spectra and redshift measurements, revealing reddening effects and proposing a masking method to improve redshift accuracy, especially at high redshifts.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the reddening caused by Mg II absorbers and introduces a masking technique to mitigate their impact on quasar redshift estimation.

Findings

Reddening E(B-V) averages 0.04 magnitudes for intervening absorbers.

Associated absorbers show increasing reddening as voff approaches zero.

Masking Mg II lines improves redshift estimates, shifting them by about 0.005.

Abstract

In this paper, we study how absorption-line systems affect the spectra and redshifts of quasars (QSOs), using catalogs of Mg II absorbers from the early data release (EDR) and first data release (DR1) of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). We determine the reddening effect of an absorption system by fitting an un-reddened template spectrum to a sample of 50,674 QSO spectra that contain Mg II absorbers. We find that reddening caused by intervening absorbers (voff > 3500 km/s) has an average color excess of E(B-V) = 0.04 magnitudes. We find that the E(B-V) tends to be greater for absorbers at low redshifts, or those having Mg II absorption lines with higher equivalent widths, but shows no clear trend with voff for intervening systems. However, the E(B-V) of associated absorbers, those at voff < 3500 km/s, shows a strong trend with voff , increasing rapidly with decreasing voff and peaking (approximately 0.15 magnitudes) around voff = 0 km/s. We demonstrate that Mg II absorbers impact redshift estimation for QSOs by investigating the distributions of voff for associated absorbers. We find that at z > 1.5 these distributions broaden and bifurcate in a nonphysical manner. In an effort to mitigate this effect, we mask pixels associated with the Mg II absorption lines and recalculate the QSO redshifts. We find that we can recover voff populations in better agreement with those for z < 1.5 absorbers and in doing so typically shift background QSO redshifts by delta_z approximately equal to plus or minus 0.005.