Related papers: Compton Heating of the Intergalactic Medium by the…
Recent work has suggested that an additional $\lesssim 6.9 \rm{\, eV}$ per baryon of heating in the intergalactic medium is needed to reconcile hydrodynamical simulations with Lyman-$\alpha$ forest absorption line widths at redshift…
Allowing for enhanced Ly$\alpha$ photon line emission from Population III dominated stellar systems in the first forming galaxies, we show the 21-cm cosmic dawn signal at $10<z<30$ may substantially differ from standard scenarios. Energy…
We measure the intergalactic medium (IGM) opacity in the Ly$\alpha$ as well as in the Ly$\beta$ forest along $19$ quasar sightlines between $5.5\lesssim z_{\rm abs}\lesssim 6.1$, probing the end stages of the reionization epoch. Owing to…
Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) afterglows close to their peak intensity are among the brightest X-ray sources in the sky. Despite their fast power-law like decay, when fluxes are integrated from minutes up to hours after the GRB event, the…
We use an analytic model to study how inhomogeneous hydrogen reionization affects the temperature distribution of the intergalactic medium (IGM). During this process, the residual energy of each ionizing photon is deposited in the IGM as…
In interstellar media characterized by a nonrelativistic plasma of electrons and heavy ions, we study the effect of axion dark matter coupled to photons on the dynamics of an electric field. In particular, we assume the presence of a…
The thermal history and structure of the intergalactic medium (IGM) at $z \geq 4$ is an important boundary condition for reionization, and a key input for studies using the Ly$\alpha$ forest to constrain the masses of alternative dark…
I present an overview of some of the recent advances in our understanding of the distribution and evolution of the ordinary, baryonic matter in the universe. Two observations that strongly suggest that most of the baryons seen at high…
Estimates of the metagalactic hydrogen ionization rate from the Lyman-alpha forest opacity in QSO absorption spectra depend on the complex density distribution of neutral hydrogen along the line-of-sight. We use a large suite of high…
Spatial variations of the [S II]/H-Alpha and [N II]/H-Alpha line intensity ratios observed in the gaseous halo of the Milky Way and other galaxies are inconsistent with pure photoionization models. They appear to require a supplemental…
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 investigate the dependence of QSO Lyman-alpha absorption features on the temperature of the absorbing gas and on the amplitude of the underlying dark matter fluctuations. We use high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations in cold dark…
The shocks produced in the intergalactic medium during large-scale structure formation accelerate a population of highly relativistic electrons which emit synchrotron radiation due to intergalactic magnetic fields. In a previous paper (Loeb…
Aims. The synthesis of the cosmic X-ray background (CXB) requires a large population of Compton-thick active galactic nuclei that have not been detected so far. We probe whether bright infrared galaxies could harbor a population of…
Very recently a new inversion method has been developped to analyze the intergalactic medium seen in absorption in quasar spectra (the so-called Lyman-alpha forest). This method is applied to recover the temperature of the gas and the…
Despite their vital importance to understand galaxy evolution and our own Galactic ecosystem, our knowledge of the physical properties of the hot phase of the Milky Way is still inadequate. However, sensitive SRG/eROSITA large area surveys…
We show that Compton scattering by electrons of the hot intergalactic gas in galaxy clusters should lead to peculiar distortions of the cosmic background X-ray and soft gamma-ray radiation - an increase in its brightness at E<60-100 keV and…
The thermal state of the post-reionization IGM is sensitive to the timing of reionization and the nature of the ionizing sources. We have modelled here the thermal state of the IGM in cosmological radiative transfer simulations of a…
Observations of the Ly-alpha forest at z~3 reveal an average metallicity Z~0.01 Z_solar. The high-redshift supernovae that polluted the IGM also accelerated relativistic electrons. Since the energy density of the CMB scales as (1+z)^4, at…
The preheating of intergalactic medium(IGM) by structure collapsing and ultraviolet background(UVB) are investigated in cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. When gravitational collapsing is the sole heating mechanism, we find that (1)…