Related papers: Did Cosmic Rays Reionize the Intergalactic Medium?
Ionized interstellar gas is an important component of the interstellar medium and its lifecycle. The recent evidence for a widely distributed highly ionized warm interstellar gas with a density intermediate between the warm ionized medium…
Cosmic rays are an essential ingredient in the evolution of the interstellar medium, as they dominate the ionisation of the dense molecular gas, where stars and planets form. However, since they are efficiently scattered by the galactic…
We study the observability of the reionization epoch through the 21 cm hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen. We use a high-resolution cosmological simulation (including hydrodynamics) together with a fast radiative transfer algorithm to…
More than 90% of the Galactic gas-related gamma-ray emissivity above 1 GeV is attributed to the decay of neutral pions formed in collisions between cosmic rays and interstellar matter, with lepton-induced processes becoming increasingly…
Unveiling the thermal history of the intergalactic medium (IGM) at $4 \leq z \leq 5$ holds the potential to reveal early onset HeII reionization or lingering thermal fluctuations from HI reionization. We set out to reconstruct the IGM gas…
The cosmological 21-cm signal from neutral hydrogen, which is considered as a promising tool, is being used to observe and study the cosmic dawn (CD) and epoch of reionization (EoR). A significant part of this thesis focuses on the…
The large cross-section of the Lyman alpha (Lya) line makes it a sensitive probe of the ionization state of the intergalactic medium (IGM). Here we present the most complete study to date of the IGM Lya opacity, and its application to the…
I use cosmological simulations that incorporate a physically motivated approximation to three-dimensional radiative transfer that recovers correct asymptotic ionization front propagation speeds for some cosmologically relevant density…
We study the process of cosmic reionization and estimate the ionizing background in the IGM using the Lyman series absorption in the spectra of the four quasars at 5.7<z<6.3 discovered by the SDSS. We derive the evolution of the ionizing…
We focus on exploring the metal enrichment of the intergalactic medium (IGM) in Cold and Warm (1.5 and 3 keV) Dark Matter (DM) cosmologies, and the constraints this yields on the DM particle mass, using a semi-analytic model, Delphi, that…
The first stars and quasars are known sources of hard ionizing radiation in the first billion years of the Universe. We examine the joint effects of X-rays and hard UV radiation from such first-light sources on the hydrogen and helium…
We calculate the evolution of Li6 generated from cosmic rays produced by an early population of massive stars. The computation is performed in the framework of hierarchical structure formation and is based on cosmic star formation histories…
Dynamically, cosmic rays with energies above about one GeV/nucleon may be important agents of galaxy evolution. Their pressures compare with the thermal and magnetic ones impacting galactic gas accretion, fountains and galactic outflows,…
The temperature of the low-density intergalactic medium is set by the balance between adiabatic cooling resulting from the expansion of the universe, and photo-heating by the UV-background. A sudden injection of entropy from the…
The cosmic 21 cm signal is set to revolutionise our understanding of the early Universe, allowing us to probe the 3D temperature and ionisation structure of the intergalactic medium (IGM). It will open a window onto the unseen first…
The first major star-forming galaxies and Active Galactic Nuclei will produce Balmer and higher order extended haloes during the Epoch of Reionization through the scattering of Lyman resonance line photons off the surrounding neutral…
The presence of metals in hot cluster gas and in Ly-alpha absorbers, as well as the mass-metallicity relation of observed galaxies, suggest that galaxies lose a significant fraction of their metals to the intergalactic medium (IGM).…
Massive stars are at the core of our observations of the Universe up to the reionization epoch, both through their intense ionizing fluxes and through the energetic end products that release fresh elements into the interstellar medium. Our…
Using a reliably measured intrinsic (i.e. corrected for absorption effects) present-day luminosity function of high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs) in the 0.25-2 keV energy band per unit star-formation rate, we estimate the preheating of the…
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…