Related papers: The Flatness and Sudden Evolution of the Intergala…
The incidence of quasar absorption systems and the space density of their galaxies are proportional, the proportionality factor being the mean absorbing cross section. In this paper we use redshift parameterizations of these two statistics…
Observations of neutral hydrogen in spiral galaxies reveal a sharp cutoff in the radial density profile at some distance from the center. Using 22 galaxies with known HI distributions as an example, we discuss the question of whether this…
The baryon mass content of dark matter halos in the early Universe depends on global factors - e.g. ionising ultraviolet (UV) radiation background - and local factors - e.g. star formation efficiency and assembly history. We use a…
Recent observations show that the measured rates of star formation in the early universe are insufficient to produce re-ionization, and therefore, another source of ionizing photons is required. In this \emph{Letter}, we examine the…
A variety of observations now indicate that intergalactic helium was fully ionized by z~3. The most recent measurements of the high-redshift quasar luminosity function imply that these sources had produced ~2.5 ionizing photons per helium…
We develop a coupled model for the evolution of the global properties of the intergalactic medium (IGM) and the formation of galaxies, in the presence of a photoionizing background due to stars and quasars. We use this model to predict the…
We study the physical origin of the low-redshift Lyman alpha forest in hydrodynamic simulations of four CDM cosmologies. Our main conclusions are insensitive to the cosmological model but depend on our assumption that the UV background…
Recent observations of the Lyman-break galaxy (LBG) luminosity function (LF) from z~6-10 show a steep decline in abundance with increasing redshift. However, the LF is a convolution of the mass function of dark matter halos (HMF)--which…
QSO near-zones are an important probe of the the ionization state of the IGM at z ~ 6-7, at the end of reionization. We present here high-resolution cosmological 3D radiative transfer simulations of QSO environments for a wide range of host…
We present a survey for metal absorption systems traced by neutral oxygen over $3.2 < z < 6.5$. Our survey uses Keck/ESI and VLT/X-Shooter spectra of 199 QSOs with redshifts up to 6.6. In total we detect 74 O I absorbers, of which 57 are…
We investigate the change in ionizing photons in galaxies between 0.2<z<0.6 using the F2 field of the SHELS complete galaxy redshift survey. We show, for the first time, that while the [OIII]/Hb and [OIII]/[OII] ratios rise, the…
Early results from the JWST observations have reported a surprisingly high number of UV-bright galaxies at $z \geq 10$, which appears to challenge the theoretical predictions from standard galaxy formation models in the $\Lambda$CDM…
We investigate the implications of our measurement of the Lyman-alpha forest opacity at redshifts 2<z<4.2 from a sample of 86 high-resolution quasar spectra for the evolution of the cosmic ultraviolet luminosity density and its sources. The…
We present a large sample of candidate galaxies at z~7--10, selected in the HUDF using the new observations made by the HST/WFC3. Our sample is composed of 20 z-dropouts, 15 Y-dropouts, and 20 J-dropouts. The surface densities of the…
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…
We use an analytic model to study how inhomogeneous hydrogen reionization affects the temperature distribution of the intergalactic medium (IGM). During this process, the residual energy of each ionizing photon is deposited in the IGM as…
We compare the available catalogs of $z\approx6$ galaxies in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (UDF) and in the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) with the expected properties of the sources of cosmological reionization from our…
Star-forming galaxies in the early universe provide us with perhaps the most natural way of explaining the reionization of the universe. Current observational results are sufficiently comprehensive, as to allow us to approximately calculate…
The density distribution of the inter-galactic medium is an uncertain but highly important issue in the study of cosmic reionization. It is expected that there are abundant gas clouds hosted by low-mass "minihalos" in the early universe,…
Reionization is an inhomogeneous process, thought to begin in small ionized bubbles of the intergalactic medium (IGM) around overdense regions of galaxies. Recent Lyman-alpha (Ly$\alpha$) studies during the epoch of reionization show…