Related papers: Reionization and its sources
The epoch of reionization (EoR) corresponds to a 'cosmic phase transition', when the neutral intergalactic medium (IGM) becomes ionized by the first stars and/or AGN. While the discoveries of Gunn-Peterson (GP) absorption troughs in the…
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…
Cosmic (hydrogen) reionization marks one of the major phase transitions of the universe at redshift z >= 6. During this epoch, hydrogen atoms in the intergalactic medium (IGM) were ionized by Lyman continuum (LyC) photons. However, it…
The temporal evolution of the ionizing UV background radiation field at high redshift provides a probe of the evolution of the early star formation rate. By comparing the observed levels of absorption in the highest redshift quasar spectra…
In light of recent observations of spectra of the quasars SDSS 1030+0524 (Becker et al. 2001) and SDSS 1044-0125 (Djorgovski et al. 2001), we study the observational signatures of different stages of the reionization epoch. During the…
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…
While most of the inter-galactic medium (IGM) today is permeated by ionized hydrogen, it was largely filled with neutral hydrogen for the first 700 million years after the Big Bang. The process that ionized the IGM (cosmic reionization) is…
The early phases of galaxy formation constitute one of the most exciting frontiers in astrophysics. It is during this era that the first luminous sources reionize the intergalactic medium - the moment when structure formation affects every…
The Epoch of Reionization marks the last major phase transition in the early Universe, during which the majority of neutral hydrogen once filling the intergalactic medium was ionized by the first galaxies. The James Webb Space Telescope is…
We present new calculations of the inhomogeneous process of cosmological reionization by carefully following the radiative transfer in pre-computed hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation. These new computations represent an…
About half a million years after the Big Bang, the ever-fading cosmic blackbody radiation cooled below 3000 K and shifted first into the infrared and then into the radio, and the smooth baryonic plasma that filled the Universe became…
The Dark Age is the period between the time when the cosmic microwave background was emitted and the time when the evolution of structure in the universe led to the gravitational collapse of objects in which the first stars were formed. The…
The history of the transition from a neutral intergalactic medium (IGM) to one that is almost fully ionized can reveal the character of cosmological ionizing sources and set important constraints on the stellar birthrate at high redshifts.…
I review recent progress and challenges in studies of the earliest galaxies, seen when the Universe was less than 1 billion years old. Can they be used as reliable tracers of the physics of cosmic reionization thereby complementing other,…
The first generations of astrophysical objects made a substantial impact on our Universe with their radiation. X-rays from the first sources, with large mean free paths, likely quickly heated the intergalactic medium (IGM). The second…
The reionization of hydrogen in the intergalactic medium (IGM) is a crucial landmark in the history of the universe, but the processes through which it occurs remain mysterious. In particular, recent numerical and analytic work suggest that…
We study the inhomogeneous reionization in a critical density CDM universe due to stellar sources, including Population III objects. The spatial distribution of the sources is obtained from high resolution numerical N-body simulations. We…
The "cosmic dawn" refers to the period of the Universe's history when stars and black holes first formed and began heating and ionizing hydrogen in the intergalactic medium (IGM). Though exceedingly difficult to detect directly, the first…
The history of the transition from a neutral intergalactic medium to one that is almost fully ionized can reveal the character of cosmological ionizing sources. In this talk I will discuss the implications for rival reionization scenarios…
The formation of the first stars and quasars marks the transition between the smooth initial state and the clumpy current state of the Universe. In popular CDM cosmologies, the first sources of light started to form at a redshift z=30 and…