4,658 research outputs found
Effective Screening due to Minihalos During the Epoch of Reionization
We show that the gaseous halos of collapsed objects introduce a substantial
cumulative opacity to ionizing radiation, even after the smoothly distributed
hydrogen in the intergalactic medium has been fully reionized. This opacity
causes a delay of around unity in redshift between the time of the overlap of
ionized bubbles in the intergalactic medium and the lifting of complete
Gunn-Peterson Lyman alpha absorption. The minihalos responsible for this
screening effect are not resolved by existing numerical simulations of
reionization.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Ap
Global 21cm signal experiments: a designer's guide
[Abridged] The spatially averaged global spectrum of the redshifted 21cm line
has generated much experimental interest, for it is potentially a direct probe
of the Epoch of Reionization and the Dark Ages. Since the cosmological signal
here has a purely spectral signature, most proposed experiments have little
angular sensitivity. This is worrisome because with only spectra, the global
21cm signal can be difficult to distinguish from foregrounds such as Galactic
synchrotron radiation, as both are spectrally smooth and the latter is orders
of magnitude brighter. We establish a mathematical framework for global signal
data analysis in a way that removes foregrounds optimally, complementing
spectra with angular information. We explore various experimental design
trade-offs, and find that 1) with spectral-only methods, it is impossible to
mitigate errors that arise from uncertainties in foreground modeling; 2)
foreground contamination can be significantly reduced for experiments with fine
angular resolution; 3) most of the statistical significance in a positive
detection during the Dark Ages comes from a characteristic high-redshift trough
in the 21cm brightness temperature; and 4) Measurement errors decrease more
rapidly with integration time for instruments with fine angular resolution. We
show that if observations and algorithms are optimized based on these findings,
an instrument with a 5 degree beam can achieve highly significant detections
(greater than 5-sigma) of even extended (high Delta-z) reionization scenarios
after integrating for 500 hrs. This is in contrast to instruments without
angular resolution, which cannot detect gradual reionization. Abrupt ionization
histories can be detected at the level of 10-100's of sigma. The expected
errors are also low during the Dark Ages, with a 25-sigma detection of the
expected cosmological signal after only 100 hrs of integration.Comment: 34 pages, 30 figures. Replaced (v2) to match accepted PRD version
(minor pedagogical additions to text; methods, results, and conclusions
unchanged). Fixed two typos (v3); text, results, conclusions etc. completely
unchange
Stability of an Ultra-Relativistic Blast Wave in an External Medium with a Steep Power-Law Density Profile
We examine the stability of self-similar solutions for an accelerating
relativistic blast wave which is generated by a point explosion in an external
medium with a steep radial density profile of a power-law index > 4.134. These
accelerating solutions apply, for example, to the breakout of a gamma-ray burst
outflow from the boundary of a massive star, as assumed in the popular
collapsar model. We show that short wavelength perturbations may grow but only
by a modest factor <~ 10.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Physical Review
Measuring the 3D Clustering of Undetected Galaxies Through Cross Correlation of their Cumulative Flux Fluctuations from Multiple Spectral Lines
We discuss a method for detecting the emission from high redshift galaxies by
cross correlating flux fluctuations from multiple spectral lines. If one can
fit and subtract away the continuum emission with a smooth function of
frequency, the remaining signal contains fluctuations of flux with frequency
and angle from line emitting galaxies. Over a particular small range of
observed frequencies, these fluctuations will originate from sources
corresponding to a series of different redshifts, one for each emission line.
It is possible to statistically isolate the fluctuations at a particular
redshift by cross correlating emission originating from the same redshift, but
in different emission lines. This technique will allow detection of clustering
fluctuations from the faintest galaxies which individually cannot be detected,
but which contribute substantially to the total signal due to their large
numbers. We describe these fluctuations quantitatively through the line cross
power spectrum. As an example of a particular application of this technique, we
calculate the signal-to-noise ratio for a measurement of the cross power
spectrum of the OI(63 micron) and OIII(52 micron) fine structure lines with the
proposed Space Infrared Telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics. We find that
the cross power spectrum can be measured beyond a redshift of z=8. Such
observations could constrain the evolution of the metallicity, bias, and duty
cycle of faint galaxies at high redshifts and may also be sensitive to the
reionization history through its effect on the minimum mass of galaxies. As
another example, we consider the cross power spectrum of CO line emission
measured with a large ground based telescope like CCAT and 21-cm radiation
originating from hydrogen in galaxies after reionization with an interferometer
similar in scale to MWA, but optimized for post-reionization redshifts.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures; Replaced with version accepted by JCAP; Added an
example of cross correlating CO line emission and 21cm line emission from
galaxies after reionizatio
Prospects for Redshifted 21-cm observations of quasar HII regions
The introduction of low-frequency radio arrays over the coming decade is
expected to revolutionize the study of the reionization epoch. Observation of
the contrast in redshifted 21cm emission between a large HII region and the
surrounding neutral IGM will be the simplest and most easily interpreted
signature. We find that an instrument like the planned Mileura Widefield Array
Low-Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) will be able to obtain good signal to noise on
HII regions around the most luminous quasars, and determine some gross
geometric properties, e.g. whether the HII region is spherical or conical. A
hypothetical follow-up instrument with 10 times the collecting area of the LFD
(MWA-5000) will be capable of mapping the detailed geometry of HII regions,
while SKA will be capable of detecting very narrow spectral features as well as
the sharpness of the HII region boundary. The MWA-5000 will discover
serendipitous HII regions in widefield observations. We estimate the number of
HII regions which are expected to be generated by quasars. Assuming a late
reionization at z~6 we find that there should be several tens of quasar HII
regions larger than 4Mpc at z~6-8 per field of view. Identification of HII
regions in forthcoming 21cm surveys can guide a search for bright galaxies in
the middle of these regions. Most of the discovered galaxies would be the
massive hosts of dormant quasars that left behind fossil HII cavities that
persisted long after the quasar emission ended, owing to the long recombination
time of intergalactic hydrogen. A snap-shot survey of candidate HII regions
selected in redshifted 21cm image cubes may prove to be the most efficient
method for finding very high redshift quasars and galaxies.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures. Submitted to Ap
Cosmological Origin of the Stellar Velocity Dispersions in Massive Early-Type Galaxies
We show that the observed upper bound on the line-of-sight velocity
dispersion of the stars in an early-type galaxy, sigma<400km/s, may have a
simple dynamical origin within the LCDM cosmological model, under two main
hypotheses. The first is that most of the stars now in the luminous parts of a
giant elliptical formed at redshift z>6. Subsequently, the stars behaved
dynamically just as an additional component of the dark matter. The second
hypothesis is that the mass distribution characteristic of a newly formed dark
matter halo forgets such details of the initial conditions as the stellar
"collisionless matter" that was added to the dense parts of earlier generations
of halos. We also assume that the stellar velocity dispersion does not evolve
much at z<6, because a massive host halo grows mainly by the addition of
material at large radii well away from the stellar core of the galaxy. These
assumptions lead to a predicted number density of ellipticals as a function of
stellar velocity dispersion that is in promising agreement with the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey data.Comment: ApJ, in press (2003); matches published versio
Scattered Lyman-alpha Radiation Around Sources Before Cosmological Reionization
The spectra of the first galaxies and quasars in the Universe should be
strongly absorbed shortward of their rest-frame Lyman-alpha wavelength by
neutral hydrogen (HI) in the intervening intergalactic medium. However, the
Lyman-alpha line photons emitted by these sources are not eliminated but rather
scatter until they redshift out of resonance and escape due to the Hubble
expansion of the surrounding intergalactic HI. We calculate the resulting
brightness distribution and the spectral shape of the diffuse Lyman-alpha line
emission around high redshift sources, before the intergalactic medium was
reionized. Typically, the Lyman-alpha photons emitted by a source at z=10
scatter over a characteristic angular radius of order 15 arcseconds around the
source and compose a line which is broadened and redshifted by about a thousand
km/s relative to the source. The scattered photons are highly polarized.
Detection of the diffuse Lyman-alpha halos around high redshift sources would
provide a unique tool for probing the neutral intergalactic medium before the
epoch of reionization. On sufficiently large scales where the Hubble flow is
smooth and the gas is neutral, the Lyman-alpha brightness distribution can be
used to determine the cosmological mass densities of baryons and matter.Comment: 21 pages, 5 Postscript figures, accepted by ApJ; figures 1--3
corrected; new section added on the detectability of Lyman alpha halos;
conclusions update
High-Redshift Galaxies: Their Predicted Size and Surface Brightness Distributions and Their Gravitational Lensing Probability
Direct observations of the first generation of luminous objects will likely
become feasible over the next decade. The advent of the Next Generation Space
Telescope (NGST) will allow imaging of numerous galaxies and mini-quasars at
redshifts z>5. We apply semi-analytic models of structure formation to estimate
the rate of multiple imaging of these sources by intervening gravitational
lenses. Popular CDM models for galaxy formation yield a lensing optical depth
of about 1% for sources at redshift 10. The expected slope of the luminosity
function of the early sources implies an additional magnification bias of about
5, bringing the fraction of lensed sources at z=10 to about 5%. We estimate the
angular size distribution of high-redshift disk galaxies and find that most of
them are more extended than the resolution limit of NGST, roughly 0.06
arcseconds. We also show that there is only a modest redshift evolution in the
mean surface brightness of galaxies at z>2. The expected increase by 1-2 orders
of magnitude in the number of resolved sources on the sky, due to observations
with NGST, will dramatically improve upon the statistical significance of
existing weak lensing measurements. We show that, despite this increase in the
density of sources, confusion noise from z>2 galaxies is expected to be small
for NGST observations.Comment: 27 pages, 8 PostScript figures (of which two are new), revised
version accepted for Ap
Inference of Marine Stratus Cloud Optical Depths from Satellite Measurements: Does 1D Theory Apply?
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