Related papers: Cosmological Reionization
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…
The cosmic reionization era, which includes formation of the first stars, galaxies, and AGN, is now one of the most active frontiers of cosmological research. We review briefly our current understanding of the early structure formation, and…
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 first dwarf galaxies, which constitute the building blocks of the collapsed objects we find today in the Universe, had formed hundreds of millions of years after the big bang. This pedagogical review describes the early growth of their…
Observational data on the early galactic abundances of the light elements lithium, beryllium and boron are combined with data related to the reionization of the intergalactic medium (IGM) in a search of processes happening in the early…
We present a detailed analysis of an astrophysical mechanism that generates cosmological magnetic fields during the Epoch of Reionization. It is based on the photoionization of the Intergalactic Medium by the first sources formed in the…
Although empirical evidence indicates that that the universe's gas had become ionized by redshift z ~ 6, the mechanism by which this transition occurred remains unclear. In this article, we explore the possibility that dark matter…
The elegance of inflationary cosmology and cosmological perturbation theory ends with the formation of the first stars and galaxies, the initial sources of light that launched the phenomenologically rich process of cosmic reionization. Here…
Energy released by a small fraction of the baryons in the universe, which condensed out of while the IGM was cold, dark, and neutral,reheated and reionized it, exposing gas clouds within it to the glare of ionizing radiation. The first gas…
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 first sources of ionizing radiation to condense out of the dark and neutral IGM sent ionization fronts sweeping outward through their surroundings, overtaking other condensed objects and photoevaporating them. This feedback effect of…
In this introductory chapter, we outline expectations for when and how the hydrogen and helium atoms in the universe turned from neutral to ionized, focusing on the earliest, least well understood stages, and emphasizing the most important…
The reionization of cosmic hydrogen, left over from the big bang, increased its temperature to >~ 1.e4 K. This photo-heating resulted in an increase of the minimum mass of galaxies and hence a suppression of the cosmic star formation rate.…
How and when did the first generation of stars form at the end of the cosmic dark ages? Quite generically, within variants of the cold dark matter model of cosmological structure formation, the first sources of light are expected to form in…
The bulk of the hydrogen in the universe transformed from neutral to ionized somewhere in the redshift interval 5 < z < 40, most likely due to ionizing photons produced by an early generation of stars or mini-quasars. The resulting free…
Galaxies at high redshifts with strong star formation are sources of high-energy cosmic rays. These cosmic rays interact with the baryon and radiation fields of the galactic environment via photo-pair, photo-pion and proton-proton processes…
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 circumgalactic medium (CGM) is fed by galaxy outflows and accretion of intergalactic gas, but its mass, heavy element enrichment, and relation to galaxy properties are poorly constrained by observations. In a survey of the outskirts of…
We incorporate quasars into an analytic model to describe the reheating and reionization of the universe. In combination with a previous study of galaxies and Lyman-$\alpha$ clouds, we are able to provide a unified description of structure…
Over the past two decades, an avalanche of data from multiwavelength imaging and spectroscopic surveys has revolutionized our view of galaxy formation and evolution. Here we review the range of complementary techniques and theoretical tools…