Related papers: Equilibration processes in the Warm-Hot Intergalac…
The temperature of the intergalactic medium (IGM) is set by the competition between photoheating and adiabatic cooling, which are usually assumed to define a tight equation of state in which the temperature increases monotonically with…
Assuming a closed universe with slight positive curvature, cosmic expansion is modeled as a heat engine where the '"system'" is defined collectively as those regions of space within the observable universe which will later evolve into voids…
The warm ($\log~T\approx5$) gas is an important gaseous component in the galaxy baryonic cycle. We built a 2-dimension disk-CGM model to study the warm gas distribution of the Milky Way (MW) using the absorption line surveys of Si IV and O…
Simulations predict that shocks from large-scale structure formation and galactic winds have reduced the fraction of baryons in the warm, photoionized phase (the Lya forest) from nearly 100% in the early universe to less than 50% today.…
We report on a systematic investigation of the cold and mildly ionized gaseous baryonic metal components of our Galaxy, through the analysis of high resolution Chandra and XMM-Newton spectra of two samples of Galactic and extragalactic…
We present a schematic model for the formation of baryonic galactic halos and hot gas in the Local Group and the intergalactic medium. We follow the dynamics, chemical evolution, heat flow and gas flows of a hierarchy of scales, including:…
Recent ultraviolet and X-ray observations of intergalactic OVI and OVII absorption systems along lines of sight to bright quasars have opened a new window onto the ``warm-hot intergalactic medium'' (WHIM). These systems appear to provide a…
The dynamical evolution of hot optically thin plasmas in the ISM crucially depends on the heating and cooling processes. It is essential to realize that all physical processes that contribute operate on different time scales. In particular…
We present model calculations of ionization fractions for elements in the warm (log T = 4), low-density photoionized interstellar medium (WIM) of the Milky Way. We model the WIM as a combination of overlapping low-excitation H II regions…
The circumgalactic medium (CGM) plays a pivotal role in regulating gas flows around galaxies and thus shapes their evolution. However, the details of how galaxies and their CGM co-evolve remain poorly understood. We present a new…
(Abridged)The temperature (T) and entropy (S) fields of baryonic gas/IGM are analyzed using simulation samples by a cosmological hydro/N-body code. We show that in the nonlinear regime the dynamical similarity between the IGM and dark…
We present a new cosmological zoom-in simulation, where the zoom region consists of two halos with virial mass M_v~5x10^{12}M_{sun} and a ~Mpc long cosmic filament connecting them at z~2. Using this simulation, we study the evolution of the…
The non-thermal source abundances of elements play a crucial role in the understanding of cosmic ray phenomena from a few GeV up to several tens of EeV. In this work a first systematic approach is presented that describes the change of the…
We analyze the IllustrisTNG simulations to study the mass, volume fraction and phase distribution of gaseous baryons embedded in the knots, filaments, sheets and voids of the Cosmic Web from redshift $z=8$ to redshift $z=0$. We find that…
Cosmological shock waves result from supersonic flow motions induced by hierarchical clustering of nonlinear structures in the universe. These shocks govern the nature of cosmic plasma through thermalization of gas and acceleration of…
We study nonideal mixing effects in the regime of warm dense matter (WDM) by computing the shock Hugoniot curves of BN, MgO, and MgSiO_3. First, we derive these curves from the equations of state (EOS) of the fully interacting systems,…
Understanding the heating of electrons to quasi-thermal energies at collisionless shocks has broad implications for plasma astrophysics. It directly impacts the interpretation of X-ray spectra from shocks, is important for understanding how…
The cycling of baryons in and out of galaxies is what ultimately drives galaxy formation and evolution. The circumgalactic medium (CGM) represents the interface between the interstellar medium and the cosmic web, hence its properties are…
Observations of line ratios in the Milky Way's warm ionized medium (WIM) suggest that photoionization is not the only heating mechanism present. For the additional heating to explain the discrepancy it would have to have a weaker dependence…
Does overall thermal equilibrium exist between ions and electrons in a weakly collisional, magnetised, turbulent plasma---and, if not, how is thermal energy partitioned between ions and electrons? This is a fundamental question in plasma…