Related papers: How exactly did the Universe become neutral?
We report the first unambiguous observational evidence of Rydberg Enhanced Recombination (RER), a potentially important recombination mechanism that has hitherto been unexplored in low-temperature photoionized plasmas. RER shares…
Radiative association and photodissociation rates are calculated for quadrupole transitions of H2. A complete set of bound and unbound states are included in a self-consistent master equation to obtain steady-state concentrations for a…
The redshifted 21-cm emission by neutral hydrogen offers a unique tool for mapping structure formation in the early universe in three dimensions. Here we provide the first detailed calculation of the 21-cm emission signal during and after…
The critical star formation rate density required to keep the intergalactic hydrogen ionised depends crucially on the average rate of recombinations in the intergalactic medium (IGM). This rate is proportional to the clumping factor C =…
We quantify and discuss the footprints of neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium (IGM) on the spectra of high-redshift (z ~ 6) sources, using mock spectra generated from hydrodynamical simulations of the IGM. We show that it should be…
We present simulations of cosmic reionization and reheating from $z=18$ to $z=5$, investigating the role of stars (emitting soft UV-photons), nuclear black holes (BHs, with power-law spectra), X-ray binaries (XRBs, with hard X-ray dominated…
We use a set of AMR hydrodynamic simulations post-processed with the radiative-transfer code RADAMESH to study how inhomogeneous HeII reionization affects the intergalactic medium (IGM). We propagate radiation from active galactic nuclei…
Velocity shifts and differential broadening of radio recombination lines are used to estimate the densities and velocities of the ionized gas in several hypercompact and ultracompact HII regions. These small HII regions are thought to be at…
We compute the spectral distortions of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) arising during the epoch of cosmological hydrogen recombination within the standard cosmological (concordance) model for frequencies in the range 1 GHz-3500 GHz.…
During its hot, dense, early evolution the Universe was a primordial nuclear reactor, synthesizing the light nuclides D, 3He, 4He and 7Li in the first thousand seconds. The presently observed abundances of these relic nuclides provide a…
We note that current observational evidence strongly favors a conventional recombination of ionized matter subsequent to redshift z=1200, followed by reionization prior to redshift z=5 and compute how this would have occurred in a standard…
Once thought to be devoid of warm and cold interstellar matter, elliptical galaxies are now commonly observed to host extended regions of neutral and ionized gas. Outside of the innermost nuclear regions of these galaxies, the favoured…
Full radiative transfer in 3D space has been solved to pursue the reionization history in an inhomogeneous universe. It has been shown that the reionization of an inhomogeneous universe is not a prompt event, but a fairly slow process.…
Feedback effects due to massive stars and supernovae in the first objects are shown to strongly regulate both galaxy formation/evolution and the reionization process. Here we review the most important ones in some detail. We discuss how…
Reionization represents an important phase in the history of our Universe when ultraviolet radiation from the first luminous sources, primarily stars and accreting black holes, ionized the neutral hydrogen atoms in the intergalactic medium…
Relativistic and channel coupling effects in photoionization and unified electronic recombination of Fe XVII are demonstrated with an extensive 60-level close coupling calculation using the Breit-Pauli R-matrix method. Photoionization and…
The universe would have been completely dark between the epoch of recombination and the development of the first non-linear structure. But at redshifts beyond 5 -- perhaps even beyond 20 -- stars formed within `subgalaxies' and created the…
Non-equilibrium ionization effects are important in cosmological hydrodynamical simulations but are computationally expensive. We study the effect of non-equilibrium ionization evolution and UV ionizing background (UVB) generated with…
It has been suggested that secondary CMB anisotropies generated by neutral lithium could open a new observational window into the universe around the redshift z ~ 400, and permit a determination of the primordial lithium abundance. The…
Recent observations and theoretical investigations of neutron stars indicate that their atmospheres consist not of hydrogen or iron but possibly other elements such as helium. We calculate the ionization and dissociation equilibrium of…