Towards Detecting The 2175-Å Dust Feature Associated With Strong High Redshift Mg ßII Absorption Lines (1103.1932v1)

Abstract: We report detections of 39 2175-{\AA} dust extinction bump candidates associated with strong Mg II absorption lines at z$\sim$ 1--1.8 on quasar spectra in Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR3. These strong Mg II absorption line systems are detected among 2,951 strong Mg II absorbers with the rest equivalent width $W_r\lambda2796 >$ 1.0{\AA} at $1.0 < z < 1.86$, which is part of a full sample of 7,421 strong Mg II absorbers compiled by Prochter et al. (2006). The redshift range of the absorbers is chosen to allow the 2175-{\AA} extinction features to be completely covered within the SDSS spectrograph operation wavelength range. An upper limit of the background quasar emission redshift at z$=$2.1 is set to prevent the Ly$\alpha$ forest lines from contaminating the sensitive spectral region for the 2175-{\AA} bump measurements. The FM90 (Fitzpatrick & Massa 1990) parameterization is applied to model the Optical/UV extinction curve in the rest frame of Mg II absorbers of the 2175-{\AA} bump candidates. The simulation technique developed by Jiang et al. (2010a, b) is used to derive the statistical significance of the candidate 2175-{\AA} bumps. A total of 12 absorbers are detected with 2175-{\AA} bumps at a 5$\sigma$ level of statistical significance, 10 are detected at a 4$\sigma$ level and 17 are detected at a 3$\sigma$ level. Most of the candidate bumps in this work are similar to the relatively weak 2175-{\AA} bumps observed in the Large Magellanic Clouds (LMC) LMC2 supershell rather than the strong ones observed in the Milky Way (MW). This sample has greatly increased the total number of 2175-{\AA} extinction bumps measured on SDSS quasar spectra. Follow-up observations may rule out some of possible false detections and reveal the physical and chemical natures of 2175-{\AA} quasar absorbers.