Related papers: Probing the Cosmic Dark Age in X-rays
Empirical studies of the first generation of stars and quasars in the Universe will likely become feasible over the next decade. The Next Generation Space Telescope will provide direct imaging and photometry of sub-galactic objects at…
Observational evidence for the accelerated expansion of the universe requires dark energy for its explanation if general relativity is an accurate model of gravity. However, dark energy is a mysterious quantity and we do not know much about…
The transition between the nearly smooth initial state of the Universe and its clumpy state today occurred during the epoch when the first stars and low-luminosity quasars formed. For Cold Dark Matter cosmologies, the radiation produced by…
It is currently unknown whether the Universe was reionized by quasars or stars at z>5. We point out that quasars can be best distinguished from stellar systems by their X-ray emission. Based on a simple hierarchical CDM model, we predict…
Quasars at z>4 provide direct information on the first massive structures to form in the Universe. Recent ground-based optical surveys (e.g., the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) have discovered large numbers of high-redshift quasars, increasing…
Chandra X-ray Observatory, (formerly known as AXAF), will observe down to the flux limit of 2\times 10^{-16} erg~s^{-1} cm^{-2}. In its first year of operation Chandra's CCD detectors will observe over 1500 quasars serendipitously in the…
Quasars are among the most luminous objects in the universe, and they can be studied in detail up to the highest known redshift. Assuming that the gas associated with quasars is closely related to the interstellar medium of the host galaxy,…
In the ROSAT era of the mid-1990's, the problems facing deep X-ray surveys could be largely solved with 10 m class telescopes. In the first decade of this new millennium, with X-ray telescopes such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory and…
We report exploratory Chandra observations of 14 high-redshift (z=4.06-5.27), optically selected quasars. Ten of these quasars are detected, increasing the number of z>4 X-ray detected quasars by 71%. Our detections include four of the five…
We report on Chandra and XMM-Newton observations of a sample of 13 quasars at z~4.7-5.4 mostly taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The present sample complements previous X-ray studies of z>4 quasars, in which the majority of…
Through a combination of deep wide-field imaging and multi-object spectroscopy, the Next Generation Space Telescope will be able to chart with unprecedented accuracy the evolution of cosmic structures after the `dark ages' (z<5), when…
Given its extraordinary spatial resolution and sensitivity, the projected Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) is likely to detect a large number of high-redshift QSOs lensed by spiral galaxies. Using realistic models for the QSO and…
We study the prospects of finding the first quasars in the universe with ALMA and JWST. For this purpose, we derive a model for the high-redshift black hole population based on observed relations between the black hole mass and the host…
In a multi-wavelength survey of $13$ quasars at $5.8\lesssim z\lesssim6.5$, that were pre-selected to be potentially young, we find five objects with extremely small proximity zone sizes that may imply UV-luminous quasar lifetimes of…
The first stars in the history of the Universe are likely to form in the dense central regions of 10^5-10^6 Msolar cold dark matter halos at z=10-50. The annihilation of dark matter particles in these environments may lead to the formation…
The Dark Ages, probed by the redshifted 21-cm signal, is the ideal epoch for a new rigorous test of the standard LCDM cosmological model. Divergences from that model would indicate new physics, such as dark matter decay (heating) or…
The cosmic "Dark Ages" is the period between the last scattering of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and the appearance of the first luminous sources, spanning redshifts $1100\gtrsim z\gtrsim 30$. The only way to observe this period is…
Luminous distant quasars are unique probes of the high redshift intergalactic medium (IGM) and of the growth of massive galaxies and black holes in the early universe. Absorption due to neutral Hydrogen in the IGM makes quasars beyond a…
In the next 30 years, a new generation of space and ground-based telescopes will permit to obtain multi-frequency observations of faint sources and, for the first time in human history, to achieve a deep, almost synoptical monitoring of the…
We present a new sample of 35 quasars selected from the FIRST radio survey and the Deeprange I-band survey (Postman et al. 1998, 2002). A comparison with the FIRST Bright Quasar survey samples reveals that this I-band selected sample is…