Related papers: Probing High Redshift Radiation Fields with Gamma-…
The brightest blazars detected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope Large Area Telescope (Fermi/LAT) show significant breaks in their spectra at a few GeV. The sharpness and the position of the breaks can be well reproduced by absorption…
The acquisition of deep Near-IR imaging with Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope has provided the opportunity to study the very-high redshift Universe. For galaxies up to $z\approx 7.7$ sufficient wavelength coverage exists to…
The goal of searching back in cosmic time to find star formation during the epoch of reionization will soon be within reach. We assess the detectability of high-redshift galaxies by combining cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy…
At TeV energies, the gamma-ray horizon of the universe is limited to redshifts z<<1, and, therefore, any observation of TeV radiation from a source located beyond z=1 would call for a revision of the standard paradigm. While robust…
There has been great progress in recent years in discovering star forming galaxies at high redshifts (z>5), close to the epoch of reionization of the intergalactic medium (IGM). The WFC3 and ACS cameras on the Hubble Space Telescope have…
The Extragalactic Background Light (EBL) includes photons with wavelengths from ultraviolet to infrared, which are effective at attenuating gamma rays with energy above ~10 GeV during propagation from sources at cosmological distances. This…
We reanalyze Fermi/LAT gamma-ray spectra of bright blazars with a higher photon statistics than in previous works and with new Pass 7 data representation. In the spectra of the brightest blazar 3C 454.3 and possibly of 4C +21.35 we detect…
We study the possible detection of and properties of very high-energy (VHE) gamma-ray emission (in the energy band above 100 GeV) from high redshift sources. We report on the detection of VHE gamma-ray flux from blazars with redshifts…
Recent findings by gamma-ray Cherenkov telescopes suggest a higher transparency of the Universe to very-high-energy (VHE) photons than expected from current models of the Extragalactic Background Light. It has been shown that such…
The attenuation of high-energy gamma-ray spectrum due to the electron-positron pair production against the extragalactic background light (EBL) provides an indirect method to measure the EBL of the universe. We use the measurements of the…
The fraction of ionizing photons that escape high-redshift galaxies sensitively determines whether galaxies reionized the early universe. However, this escape fraction cannot be measured from high-redshift galaxies because the opacity of…
The expected opacity of the intergalactic space limits the mean free path of TeV gamma rays to dozens of Megaparsecs. However, TeV photons from numerous more distant sources have been detected. This might be interpreted, in each particular…
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…
Recent observations of high-redshift galaxies and quasars indicate that the hydrogen component of the intergalactic medium (IGM) must have been reionized at some redshift z>6. Prior to complete reionization, sources of ultraviolet radiation…
The redshift at which the universe was reionized is currently unknown. We examine the optimal strategy for extracting this redshift, z_{reion}, from the spectra of early sources. For a source located at a redshift z_s beyond but close to…
Lyman alpha emission presents a means of identifying very high redshift galaxies, provided such objects can be reliably distinguished from foreground emission-line galaxies. Here we report on a program of imaging and spectroscopic studies…
The Extragalactic Background Light (EBL) from the infrared (IR) through the ultraviolet (UV) is dominated by emission from stars, either directly or through absorption and reradiation by dust. It can thus give information on the star…
Reionization is thought to be dominated by low mass galaxies, while direct observations of resolved galaxies probe only the most massive, rarest objects. The cross-correlation between fluctuations in the surface brightness of the cumulative…
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 investigate potential $\gamma-\gamma$ absorption of gamma-ray emission from blazars arising from inhomogeneities along the line of sight, beyond the diffuse Extragalactic Background Light (EBL). As plausible sources of excess…