Related papers: What causes the Ly-alpha forest, clouds or large-s…
Essentially all high-redshift galaxies show evidence for strong large-scale outflows that should have a profound effect on the structure and kinematics of both the galaxies themselves and their environment. The interstellar absorption…
Ly$\alpha$ forests are usually associated with intergalactic gas clouds intercepting the quasar sight--line. Using as an example the Ly$\alpha$ forest of QSO 0055--26 ($z_{em} = 3.66$), we show that the probability of observing a line at…
Powerful outflows from star-forming galaxies are expected to push away the neutral intergalactic medium (IGM) around those galaxies, and produce absorption-free gaps in the Ly-alpha forest. We analyze the abundance of gaps of various sizes…
Ultraviolet spectrographs aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) have proved their value as sensitive probes of the low-density intergalactic medium (IGM) at low redshifts (z < 0.1).…
In recent years, the autocorrelation of the hydrogen Lyman-{\alpha} forest has been used to observe the baryon acoustic peak at redshift 2 < z < 3.5 using tens of thousands of QSO spectra from the BOSS survey. However, the interstellar…
We provide an analytical description of the line broadening of HI absorbers in the Lyman-alpha forest resulting from Doppler broadening and Jeans smoothing. We demonstrate that our relation captures the dependence of the line-width on…
Based on the empirical formulas governing the distribution of Ly-a forest absorption, we use a Monte-Carlo technique to calculate the average HeII optical depth produced by these forest lines. A substantial contribution to HeII absorption…
We have re--examined the chemical composition of \lya clouds using the composite--cloud technique, in which each \lya line in a spectrum is shifted to its rest frame wavelength and all rest frame spectra are co--added to form an `averaged'…
We show that the Lyman-alpha optical depth statistics in the proximity regions of quasar spectra depend on the mass of the dark matter halos hosting the quasars. This is owing to both the overdensity around the quasars and the associated…
The low density hydrogen and helium in the IGM probed by QSO absorption lines is sensitive to the amplitude and spectral shape of the metagalactic UV background. We use realistic HI and HeII Ly-alpha forest spectra, constructed from…
We present a set of ultra-large particle-mesh simulations of the LyA forest targeted at understanding the imprint of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the inter-galactic medium. We use 9 dark matter only simulations which can, for the…
We present a new HST/STIS spectrum of the z=3.18 quasar PKS 1935-692 and summarize the spectral features shortwards of 304A in the rest frame likely to be caused by foreground HeII Lyman-alpha absorption. In accord with previous results on…
Soon after the first QSO was identified, Gunn & Peterson searched for the expected characteristic absorption trough on the blueward side of Lya in the spectrum of the QSO due to an Intergalactic Medium (IGM). They failed to find it, placing…
We derive analytic lower bounds on the cosmic baryon density by requiring that the high-redshift IGM contain enough neutral hydrogen to produce the observed \lya absorption in quasar spectra. The key theoretical assumption is that absorbing…
We present a novel Bayesian method for the joint reconstruction of cosmological matter density fields, peculiar velocities and power-spectra in the quasi-nonlinear regime. We study its applicability to the Ly-alpha forest based on multiple…
The spatial distribution of the Ly$\alpha$ forest is studied using new HST data for the quasar pair Q~1026--0045 A and B at $z_{em}$ = 1.438 and 1.520 respectively. The angular separation is 36 arcsec and corresponds to transverse linear…
We investigate the heavy element QSO absorption systems caused by gas condensations at high redshift which evolve into galaxies with circular velocity of 100 to 200 km/s at the present epoch. Artificial QSO spectra were generated for a…
The Lyman-$\alpha$ forests observed in the spectra of high-redshift quasars can be used as a tracer of the cosmological matter density to study baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) and the Alcock-Paczynski effect. Extraction of cosmological…
Lyman-$\alpha$(Ly$\alpha$) forest in the spectra of distant quasars encodes the information of the underlying cosmic density field at smallest scales. The modelling of the upcoming large and high-fidelity forest data using cosmological…
We reassess constraints on the cosmological baryon density from observations of the mean decrement and power spectrum of the Lyman-alpha forest, taking into account uncertainties in all free parameters in the simplest gravitational…