Related papers: Time-evolution of ionization and heating around fi…
One of the key observables of the reionization era is the distribution of neutral and ionized gas. Recently, Furlanetto, Zaldarriaga, & Hernquist developed a simple analytic model to describe the growth of HII regions during this era. Here,…
The ionization and thermal state of the intergalactic medium (IGM) during the epoch of reionization has been of interest in recent times because of their close connection to the first stars. We present in this paper a semi-numerical code…
The first astrophysical objects shaped the cosmic environment by reionizing and heating the intergalactic medium (IGM). In particular, X-rays are very efficient at heating the IGM before it became completely ionized, an effect that can be…
At the beginning of the reionization epoch, radiation sources produce fluctuations in the redshifted 21-cm background. We show that different types of sources (such as miniquasars, Pop II and III stars, supernovae, etc.) produce distinct…
The feasibility of making highly redshifted HI 21-cm (rest frame) measurements from an early epoch of the Universe between the Dark Ages and Reionization (i.e., z>6 and nu<200 MHz) to probe the effects of feedback from the first stars and…
We present an efficient heating/cooling method coupled with chemistry and ultraviolet (UV) radiative transfer, which can be applied to numerical simulations of the interstellar medium (ISM). We follow the time-dependent evolution of…
The reionization of cosmic hydrogen, left over from the big bang, increased its temperature to >~ 1.e4 K. This photo-heating resulted in an increase of the minimum mass of galaxies and hence a suppression of the cosmic star formation rate.…
We simulate a plausible cosmological model in considerable physical and numerical detail through the successive phases of reheating (at 10<z<20), formation of Pop III stars at z=15 (due to molecular hydrogen cooling), with subsequent…
Spatially resolved studies of star forming regions show that the assumption of spherical geometry is not realistic in most cases, with a major complication posed by the gas being ionised by multiple non-centrally located stars or star…
The relationship between stellar populations and the ionizing flux with which they irradiate their surroundings has profound implications for the evolution of the intergalactic medium. We quantify the ionizing flux arising from synthetic…
During reionization, the intergalactic medium is heated impulsively by supersonic ionization fronts (I-fronts). The peak gas temperatures behind the I-fronts, $T_\mathrm{reion}$, are a key uncertainty in models of the thermal history after…
We show that the cosmic star formation rate per comoving volume should exhibit a distinct drop around the reionization redshift, when the HII regions in the intergalactic medium around individual ionizing sources first overlapped. The drop…
Mass-loss and radiation feedback from evolving massive stars produce galactic-scale superwinds, sometimes surrounded by pressure-driven bubbles. Using the time-dependent stellar population typically seen in star-forming regions, we conduct…
Massive stars form deeply embedded in dense molecular gas, which they stir and heat up and ionize. During an early phase, the ionization is confined to hypercompact HII regions, and the stellar radiation is entirely absorbed by dust, giving…
Aims: We systematically explore a plausible subset of the parameter space involving effective temperatures and metallicities of the ionizing stellar sources, the effects of the hardening of their radiation by surrounding leaky HII regions…
Quasars are among the most luminous objects in the universe, and they can be studied in detail up to the highest known redshift. Assuming that the gas associated with quasars is closely related to the interstellar medium of the host galaxy,…
We consider the evolution of the sky-averaged 21 cm background during the early phases of structure formation. Using simple analytic models, we calculate the thermal and ionization histories, assuming that stellar photons dominate the…
Over decades of solar wind observations, heavy ions have been observed to have a higher temperature and flow faster than protons in the solar corona and heliosphere. Remote observations have largely been limited to the low corona ($<…
We discuss the photoionization of the intergalactic medium by early formed quasars and propose a mechanism which could generate measurable temperature fluctuations $\delta_{T }~=~\Delta T/T$ of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Early…
We note that current observational evidence strongly favors a conventional recombination of ionized matter subsequent to redshift z=1200, followed by reionization prior to redshift z=5 and compute how this would have occurred in a standard…