The ESO UVES advanced data products quasar sample - I. Dataset and new NH?I measurements of damped absorbers

摘要

We present here a dataset of quasars observed with the Ultraviolet Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) on the Very Large Telescope and available in the European Southern Observatory UVES Advanced Data Products archive. The sample is made up of a total of?250?high resolution quasar spectra with emission redshifts ranging from 0.191?≤?zem?≤?6.311. The total UVES exposure time of this dataset is 1560 h. Thanks to the high resolution of UVES spectra, it is possible to unambiguously measure the column density of absorbers with damping wings, down to NH???I???1019 cm-2, which constitutes the sub-damped Lyα absorber (sub-DLA) threshold. Within the wavelength coverage of our UVES data, we find 150 damped Lyα systems (DLAs)/sub-DLAs in the range 1.5?