# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

Chemical evolution models have been developed to reproduce the observational features obtained from the solar neighbourhood and the whole Galaxy structure studies. These data give us information about the galactic evolution up to a galactocentric distance of $`1525`$ kpc and in the last $`1116`$ Gyr. However, in many cases, models which give similar results for the present time diverge significantly at different epochs. New data on high redshift objects – i.e. objects far away in space and time – can now be used to test model predicted past galaxy properties which can then constitute important constraints for evolution models.

We use the multiphase model results calculated for MWG and compare them with observational data from , and , in order to test if damped Ly$`\alpha `$ systems have abundances consistent with those expected for high redshift spiral galaxies. We have assumed values of $`q_0`$ and $`H_0`$ of 0.1 and 50 km s<sup>-1</sup> Mps<sup>-1</sup> respectively. The redshift $`z`$ corresponds to the redshift of damped Ly$`\alpha `$ systems.

## 2 The chemical evolution model

We use the evolutionary history of the Milky Way, assumed to be a typical spiral galaxy. We take the multiphase model results from  for MWG, where we computed the element distributions, in the halo and in the disk, by varying the radial galactocentric distance of every considered region. We have extracted the outputs for the regions centered on 8 kpc (solar) and 5 kpc and 14 kpc (here-on called inner and outer zones) from the galactic center. Assuming that the absorbing gas in the line of sight to the damped Ly$`\alpha `$ systems may belong to both halo and disk components, we evaluate the abundance by averaging the abundances for the two populations with their corresponding weights.

Our results are shown in Figure 1. In the left panel, we show the average abundance for the three defined regions. The inner and solar region evolutions fit better the higher abundance data points, while the outer region abundance fits the lower observed abundances. The history of the different regions can reproduce the spread in the observations. Observations possibly average also over a great part of the Galactic structure: the dashed line shows our average for both disk and halo at all radii. In the right panel we plot the gas column density results which also have contributions from the gas present both in the spheroidal and disk components of the galaxy. The column density is sensitive to the inclination angle of the disk respect to the line of sight: the two solid lines represent the evolution for a face–on galaxy (lower line) and for an edge–on galaxy (upper line). The distribution of the observed values is bound by these simple estimates.

## 3 Conclusions

The possibility that Damped Lyman $`\alpha `$ systems be indeed normal spiral galaxies () must be considered: observations probably refer to gas belonging to different components and therefore the observed abundances are averaged over the halo and disk gas, if not over the whole galactic content. We confirm that the large metallicity spread observed in DLA systems can be explained by the heterogeneous mixture of galactic regions and galaxy types.