Related papers: A New Method to Directly Measure the Jeans Scale o…
The thermal state of the intergalactic medium (IGM) at z < 6 constrains the nature and timing of cosmic reionization events, but its inference from the Ly-alpha forest is degenerate with the 3-D structure of the IGM on ~100 kpc scales,…
The distribution of diffuse gas in the intergalactic medium (IGM) imprints a series of hydrogen absorption lines on the spectra of distant background quasars known as the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest. Cosmological hydrodynamical simulations…
The spherical Jeans equation is a widely used tool for dynamical study of gravitating systems in astronomy. Here we test its efficacy in robustly weighing the mass of Milky Way analogues, given they need not be in equilibrium or even…
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…
We investigate the precision with which the Lyman-$\alpha$ damping wing signature imprinted on the spectra of high-redshift quasars (QSOs) by the foreground neutral intergalactic medium (IGM) can measure the history of cosmic reionization.…
We present measurements of the intergalactic medium (IGM) temperature within ~5 proper Mpc of seven luminous quasars at z~6. The constraints are obtained from the Doppler widths of Lyman-alpha absorption lines in the quasar near-zones and…
This study aims to test a potential application of lognormal seminumerical simulations to recover the thermal parameters and Jeans length. This could be suitable for generating large number of synthetic spectra with various input data and…
Early in the reionization process, the intergalactic medium (IGM) would have been quite inhomogeneous on small scales, due to the low Jeans mass in the neutral IGM and the hierarchical growth of structure in a cold dark matter Universe.…
Luminous $z\ge7$ quasars provide direct probes of the evolution of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and the intergalactic medium (IGM) during the epoch of reionization (EoR). The Ly$\alpha$ damping wing absorption imprinted by neutral…
Arguably the best hope of understanding the tail end of the reionization of the intergalactic medium (IGM) at redshift z > 6 is through the detection and characterization of the Gunn-Peterson (GP) damping wing absorption of the IGM in…
The thermal evolution of the intergalactic medium (IGM) can serve as a sensitive probe of cosmological heat sources and sinks. We employ it to limit interactions between dark matter and baryons. After reionization the IGM temperature is set…
We present two measurements of the temperature-density relationship (TDR) of the intergalactic medium (IGM) in the redshift range $2.55 < z < 2.95$ using a sample of 13 high-quality quasar spectra and high resolution numerical simulations…
We investigate the dependence of QSO Lyman-alpha absorption features on the temperature of the absorbing gas and on the amplitude of the underlying dark matter fluctuations. We use high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations in cold dark…
The absorption by neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium (IGM) produces the Ly$\alpha$ forest in the spectra of quasars. The Ly$\alpha$ forest absorbers have a broad distribution of neutral hydrogen column density $N_{\rm HI}$ and…
We investigate a contribution of the Jeans smoothing to the minimal width of Ly$\alpha$ forest lines and discuss how the accounting for this additional broadening affects the inferred parameters of the intergalactic matter equation of…
The temperature of the low-density intergalactic medium (IGM) at high redshift is sensitive to the timing and nature of hydrogen and HeII reionization, and can be measured from Lyman-alpha forest absorption spectra. Since the memory of…
The reionization of helium is thought to occur at $2.5\lesssim z\lesssim4$, marking the last phase transition and final global heating event of the intergalactic medium (IGM). Since it is driven by rare quasars, helium reionization should…
The thermal state of the intergalactic medium (IGM) contains vital information about the epoch of reionization, one of the most transformative yet poorly understood periods in the young universe. This thermal state is encoded in the…
The evolution of the temperature in the intergalactic medium is related to the reionization of hydrogen and helium, and has important consequences for our understanding of the Lya forest and of galaxy formation in gravitational models of…
The thermal state of the intergalactic medium (IGM) provides an indirect probe of both the HI and HeII reionisation epochs. Current constraints on the IGM temperature from the Lya forest are restricted to the redshift range 2<z<4.5,…