I will review the search for emission counterparts of damped Lyman-alpha absorbers selected for their strong neutral hydrogen absorption seen towards distant quasars. Over the years, several studies have been carried out looking for the galaxies responsible for the absorption, but the detection rate has been very low (~10%). Based on hints of an underlying mass-metallicity relation for absorption-selected galaxies we have undertaken a survey for high-metallicity absorbers and find that these have a much higher detection rate (~50%). In this talk I will present the results of our study and describe the model we put forward to reproduce our results together with the previous numerous non-detections. Lastly, I will highlight some very recent results from our extended modeling of HI-selected galaxies and elaborate on some future prospects.

Page created on October 2, 2017.