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arXiv 0901.2584astro-ph.CO
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氦电离背景下的空间相关

Spatial Correlations in the Helium-Ionizing Background

Steven Furlanetto

摘要:

当类星体在z~3处包围星系际He Ⅱ后,在He Ⅱ电离边缘上方形成一个大的辐射场.与负责HI电离的背景不同,这个场应该是高度可变的,这要归功于明亮的类星体的稀缺性和这些高能光子相对较短的衰减长度(~50 Mpc)。最近对HeII和HI莱曼α森林的观测表明,这种背景确实变化很大,在小至~2 Mpc的尺度上有很大的波动。在这里,我们表明,这样的空间波动尺度是自然预期在任何模型中,其中的源是罕见的明亮的类星体,只要衰减长度是相对较小的。对于最合理的物理场景,相关长度本身与衰减长度(~10 Mpc)相当,但我们发现所有尺度上的数量级波动小于~6 Mpc。此外,沿HeII和HI莱曼α森林探测的一维串的混叠夸大了这些变化,因此在小于~20 Mpc的所有尺度上都应该观察到数量级波动。因此,至少在目前的数据水平上,不需要用复杂的辐射转移来解释观测到的波动。

英文摘要:

After quasars ionize intergalactic HeII at z~3, a large radiation field builds up above the HeII ionization edge. Unlike the background responsible for HI ionizations, this field should be highly variable, thanks to the scarcity of bright quasars and the relatively short attenuation lengths (~50 Mpc) of these high-energy photons. Recent observations of the HeII and HI Lyman-alpha forests show that this background does indeed vary strongly, with substantial fluctuations on scales as small as ~2 Mpc. Here we show that such spatial fluctuation scales are naturally expected in any model in which the sources are as rare as bright quasars, so long as the attenuation length is relatively small. The correlation length itself is comparable to the attenuation length (~10 Mpc) for the most plausible physical scenarios, but we find order-of-magnitude fluctuations on all scales smaller than ~6 Mpc. Moreover, aliasing along the one-dimensional skewers probed by the HeII and HI Lyman-alpha forests exaggerates these variations, so that order-of-magnitude fluctuations should be observed on all scales smaller than ~20 Mpc. Complex radiative transfer is therefore not required to explain the observed fluctuations, at least at the level of current data.

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