The Mysterious Absence of Neutral Hydrogen within One Mpc of a Luminous Quasar at Redshift.pdf

a r X i v : a s t r o - p h / 0 4 0 5 5 0 6 v 1 2 5 M a y 2 0 0 4 Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 000, 000–000 (0000) Printed 2 February 2008 (MN LATEX style file v2.2) The Mysterious Absence of Neutral Hydrogen within One Mpc of a Luminous Quasar at Redshift 2.168 Paul J. Francis 1,2 and Joss Bland-Hawthorn 3? 1Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Australian National University, Canberra 0200, Australia 2Joint Appointment with the Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, the Australian National University 3Anglo-Australian Observatory, P.O. Box 296, Epping, NSW 2121, Australia 2 February 2008 ABSTRACT The intense UV radiation from a highly luminous QSO should excite fluores- cent Lyα emission from any nearby neutral hydrogen clouds. We present a very deep narrow-band search for such emission near the z=2.168 quasar PKS 0424-131, ob- tained with the Taurus Tunable Filter on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. By working in the UV, at high spectral resolution and by using charge shuffling, we have been able to reach surface brightness limits as faint as 4.7 × 10?19erg cm?2s?1arcsec?2. No fluorescent Lyα emission is seen, whereas QSO absorption-line statistics suggest that we should have seen ～ 6 clouds, unless the clouds are larger than ～ 100 kpc in size. Furthermore, we do not even see the normal population of Lyα emitting galaxies found by other surveys at this redshift. This is very different from observations of high redshift radio galaxies, which seem to be surrounded by clusters of Lyα emitters. We tentatively conclude that there is a deficit of neutral hydrogen close to this quasar, perhaps due to the photo-evaporation of nearby dwarf galaxies. Key words: Diffuse radiation — intergalactic medium — quasars: absorption-lines — quasars: individual: PKS 0424-131 — galaxies: high-redshift 1 INTRODUCTION QSO absorption-line statistics tell us that the high redshift (z 2) universe contains many clouds of neutral hydro- gen: clouds containing as many bary