Element abundances at high redshift

Abstract

I review measurements of element abundances in different components of the high redshift universe, including the Lyman alpha forest, damped Lyman alpha systems, and Lyman break galaxies. Although progress is being made in all three areas, recent work has also produced some surprises and shown that established ideas about the nature of the damped Lyman alpha systems in particular may be too simplistic. Overall, our knowledge of metal abundances at high z is still very sketchy. Most significantly, there seems to be an order of magnitude shortfall in the comoving density of metals which have been measured up to now compared with those produced by the star formation activity seen in Lyman break galaxies. At least some of the missing metals are likely to be in hot gas in galactic halos and proto-clusters.