Speaker
Mr
Mitesh Patel
(Imperial College London)
Description
The UKIRT Infra-red Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) is the next generation deep sky survey.
The Large Area Survey (LAS), within UKIDSS, aims to observe 4000 deg2 in Y, J, H and
K, and provide near-ir counterparts to SDSS which are 3 magnitudes deeper than 2MASS.
We present two z>6 quasar discovered by UKIDSS-LAS. We perform a detailed study of
the Lyman alpha forest and find that this object has similar Lyman alpha absorption
properties as other high-redshift quasars found in optical surveys, in particular the
suggestion that the effective optical depth increases significantly at z > 5.5. This
suggests that subsequent high-redshift quasars discovered in near-IR surveys like
UKIDSS will be accurate probes of cosmological reionization to a redshift of 7 and
beyond.
Primary author
Mr
Mitesh Patel
(Imperial College London)
Co-authors
Dr
Daniel Mortlock
(Imperial College London)
Prof.
Stephen Warren
(Imperial College London)
