Matter temperature after cosmological recombination
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
2015-05-13 v2
Abstract
The temperature of the atomic matter in the Universe is held to that of the Cosmic Background radiation until decoupling at z~100. After this it cools faster than the radiation (\propto(1+z)^2 rather than (1+z)) and would have fallen to about 20mK today if astrophysical feedback processes had not heated up the interglactic medium. We show how the derivative of the Compton coupling equation helps numerically to follow the decoupling process.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0902.3438,
title = {Matter temperature after cosmological recombination},
author = {Douglas Scott and Adam Moss},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0902.3438},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
2 pages, short and sweet, MNRAS in press, revised to match accepted version