Related papers: Have the missing cosmic baryons been found?
The universe was reionized by redshift z ~ 6 by a small fraction of the baryons in the universe, which released energy following their condensation out of a cold, dark, and neutral IGM into the earliest galaxies. The theory of this…
We briefly discuss the relevance of Lyman alpha forest observations for measuring cosmological parameters, comparing the properties of high z QSO spectra with those of artifical spectra from hydrodynamic simulations, based on hierarchical…
The hot, diffuse gas that fills the largest overdense structures in the Universe -- clusters of galaxies and a web of giant filaments connecting them -- provides us with tools to address a wide array of fundamental astrophysical and…
The physical characteristics of the Lyman-alpha forest cloud systems are combined with observations on the baryonic mass density of the Universe and constraints from primordial nucleosynthesis to set boundary conditions on the Intergalactic…
We present a survey of six low to moderate redshift quasars with Chandra and XMM-Newton. The primary goal is to search for the narrow X-ray absorption lines produced by highly ionized metals in the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium. All the…
The recently observed Deuterium abundance in a low- metallicity high-redshift hydrogen cloud, which is about ten times larger than that observed in the near interstellar medium, is that expected from the Standard Big Bang Nucleosynthesis…
Numerical simulations of the intergalactic medium have shown that at the present epoch a significant fraction (40-50%) of the baryonic component should be found in the (T~10^6K) Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM) - with several recent…
The Gunn-Peterson effect, absorption of Lya photons by a homogeneous component of the intergalactic medium (IGM), potentially provides a test of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). With a lower limit on the UV radiation field estimated from the…
There is a growing consensus that in the present universe most baryons reside in galaxy clusters and groups in the form of highly ionized gas at temperatures of 10^6 ~ 10^8 K. The H-like and He-like ions of the heavy elements can produce…
The Hot Universe Baryon Surveyor (HUBS) mission is proposed to study "missing" baryons in the universe. Unlike dark matter, baryonic matter is made of elements in the periodic table, and can be directly observed through the electromagnetic…
At low redshifts, measurements of the total baryon content in stars, atomic and molecular hydrogen, and cluster gas fall a factor of two to four below the baryon density derived from observed light-element ratios and nucleosynthesis…
The circumgalactic medium (CGM), which harbors > 50% of all the baryons in a galaxy, is both the reservoir of gas for subsequent star formation and the depository of chemically processed gas, energy, and angular momentum from feedback. As…
The backbone of the large-scale structure of the Universe is determined by processes on a cosmological scale and by the gravitational interaction of the dominant dark matter. However, the mobile baryon population shapes the appearance of…
We investigate the behaviour of cosmological baryons at low redshifts $z<5$ after reionization through analytic means. In particular, we study the density-temperature phase-diagram which describes the history of the gas. We show how the…
We present a measurement of the deuterium to hydrogen ratio in a quasar absorption system at redshift z = 3.57 towards QSO 1937-1009. We use a two component fit, with redshifts determined from unsaturated metal lines, to fit the hydrogen…
Galaxy clusters are the largest and most massive bound objects resulting from cosmic hierarchical structure formation. Baryons account for somewhat more than 10% of that mass, with roughly 90% of the baryonic matter distributed throughout…
It has been suggested by Bartlett and Hall that our universe may have the critical density in baryons by virtue of specific interactions with a `shadow' world. We show that this possibility is severely constrained by primordial…
In the Big Bang about 5% of the mass that was created was in the form of normal baryonic matter (neutrons and protons). Of this about 10% ended up in galaxies in the form of stars or of gas (that can be in molecules, can be atomic, or can…
About 30-50% of the baryons in the local Universe are unaccounted for and are likely in a hot phase, 10^5.5-10^8 K. A hot halo (10^6.3 K) is detected around the Milky Way through the O VII and O VIII resonance absorption and emission lines…
Observations at low redshifts thus far fail to account for all of the baryons expected in the Universe according to cosmological constraints. A large fraction of the baryons presumably resides in a thin and warm-hot medium between the…