A&A 558, A111 (2013) Astronomy DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201321745 & c ESO 2013 Astrophysics A glance at the host galaxy of high-redshift quasars using strong damped Lyman-α systems as coronagraphs Hayley Finley1, Patrick Petitjean1, Isabelle Pâris2, Pasquier Noterdaeme1, Jonathan Brinkmann3,AdamD.Myers4, Nicholas P. Ross5, Donald P. Schneider6,7, Dmitry Bizyaev3, Howard Brewington3, Garrett Ebelke3, Elena Malanushenko3 , Viktor Malanushenko3 , Daniel Oravetz3,KaikePan3, Audrey Simmons3, and Stephanie Snedden3 1 Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, CNRS-UPMC, UMR7095, 98bis Bd Arago, 75014 Paris, France e-mail:
[email protected] 2 Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de Chile, Casilla 36-D, Santiago, Chile 3 Apache Point Observatory, PO Box 59, Sunspot, NM 88349-0059, USA 4 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82071, USA 5 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 92420, USA 6 Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA 7 Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA Received 20 April 2013 / Accepted 2 August 2013 ABSTRACT We searched quasar spectra from the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) for the rare occurrences where a strong damped Lyman-α absorber (DLA) blocks the Broad Line Region emission from the quasar and acts as a natural coronagraph to reveal narrow Lyα emission from the host galaxy. We define a statistical sample of 31 DLAs in Data Release 9 (DR9) with log N(H i) ≥ 21.3cm−2 located at less than 1500 km s−1 from the quasar redshift.