Related papers: The Intergalactic Medium and Soft X-ray Background
Observations of the hot X-ray emitting interstellar medium in the Milky Way are important for studying the stellar feedback and understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies. We present measurements of the soft X-ray background…
Numerical simulations predict that a large number of baryons reside in intergalactic space at temperatures between 10^5-10^7 K. Highly-ionized metals, such as O VII and O VIII, are good tracers of this ``warm-hot intergalactic medium'', or…
We investigate the suppression of the baryon density fluctuations compared to the dark matter in the linear regime. Previous calculations predict that the suppression occurs up to a characteristic mass scale of ~ 1,000,000 solar masses,…
Thermal regime of the baryons behind shock waves arising in the process of virialization of dark matter halos is governed at cetrain conditions by radiation of HD lines. A small fraction of the shocked gas can cool down to the temperature…
After recombination the cosmic gas was left in a cold and neutral state. However, as the first stars and black holes formed within early galactic systems, their UV and X-ray radiation induced a gradual phase transition of the intergalactic…
For low-redshift cosmology and galaxy formation rates, it is important to account for all the baryons synthesized in the Big Bang. Although galaxies and clusters contain 10% of the baryons, many more reside in the photoionized Lyman-alpha…
It is shown that inverse Compton gamma-rays from electrons accelerated in large scale structure formation shocks can be crucially affected by non-gravitational effects such as radiative cooling and galaxy formation, with corresponding…
We present an argument for a {\it lower limit} to the Compton-$y$ parameter describing spectral distortions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The absence of a detectable Gunn-Peterson signal in the spectra of high redshift quasars…
We assess the possibility to detect the warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM) in emission and to characterize its physical conditions and spatial distribution through spatially resolved X-ray spectroscopy, in the framework of the recently…
The cosmic thermal history, quantified by the evolution of the mean thermal energy density in the universe, is driven by the growth of structures as baryons get shock heated in collapsing dark matter halos. This process can be probed by…
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. We have analysed the Lyman-alpha forest of eleven…
Many models of early structure formation predict a period of heating immediately preceding reionization, when X-rays raise the gas temperature above that of the cosmic microwave background. These X-rays are often assumed to heat the…
We describe an extensive FUSE survey of highly ionized oxygen in the vicinity of the Milky Way that serves as an example of the type of study that would be desirable for other galactic systems. Understanding the origin of hot gas in the…
The interstellar medium (ISM) of galaxies very often contains a gas component that reaches the temperature of several million degrees, whose physical and chemical properties can be investigated through imaging and spectroscopy in the…
I review recent results from our deep ROSAT and Chandra observations of two galaxies, M101 and NGC 4631, in fields of exceptionally low Galactic extinction. Large amounts of X-ray-emitting gas are detected in these galaxies. Such gas is…
More than three quarters of the baryonic content of the Universe resides in a highly diffuse state that is difficult to observe, with only a small fraction directly observed in galaxies and galaxy clusters. Censuses of the nearby Universe…
We study the detailed structure of galaxies at redshifts z > 2 using cosmological simulations with improved modeling of the interstellar medium and star formation. The simulations follow the formation and dissociation of molecular hydrogen,…
We report on the observed properties of the plasma revealed through high signal-to-noise (S/N) observations of 54 intervening O VI absorption systems containing 85 O VI and 133 H I components in a blind survey of 14 QSOs observed at ~18 km…
We present a deep XMM-Newton observation of the Galactic halo emission in the direction of the blazar 1ES 1553+113. In order to extract the Galactic halo component from the diffuse soft X-ray emission spectrum, accurately modeling the…
We provide a complete census of the baryons in early galaxies to investigate the phases in which gas and stars reside, their corresponding budgets, depletion times, and stellar return fraction as a function of redshift and stellar age. We…