Effective Screening due to Minihalos During the Epoch of Reionization
Astrophysics
2009-11-07 v1
Abstract
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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0204139,
title = {Effective Screening due to Minihalos During the Epoch of Reionization},
author = {Rennan Barkana and Abraham Loeb},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0204139},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
24 pages, 5 figures, submitted to ApJ