Astrophysics from the Highly-Redshifted 21 cm Line
Steven Furlanetto, Adam Lidz, Abraham Loeb, Matthew McQuinn, Jonathan Pritchard, James Aguirre, Marcelo Alvarez, Donald Backer, Judd Bowman, Jack Burns, Chris C… 展开作者
Steven Furlanetto, Adam Lidz, Abraham Loeb, Matthew McQuinn, Jonathan Pritchard, James Aguirre, Marcelo Alvarez, Donald Backer, Judd Bowman, Jack Burns, Chris Carilli, Renyue Cen, Asantha Cooray, Nickolay Gnedin, Lincoln Greenhill, Zoltan Haiman, Jacqueline Hewitt, Joseph Lazio, Andrei Mesinger, Piero Madau, Miguel Morales, S. Peng Oh, Jeffrey Peterson, Ylva Pihlstrom, Paul Shapiro, Max Tegmark, Hy Trac, Oliver Zahn, Matias Zaldarriaga
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8 pages, 5 figures, science white paper submitted to the US Astro2010 Decadal Survey "Galaxies across Cosmic Time" Science Frontier Panel
The cosmic dark ages and the epoch of reionization, during which the first generations of stars and galaxies formed, are among the most compelling frontiers of extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology. Here we describe an exciting new probe of these eras: the 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen, which will allow us to map the neutral intergalactic medium throughout the era of first galaxy formation. In this white paper, we describe how these studies can answer two key questions about galaxy formation: What were the properties of high-redshift galaxies? How did they affect the Universe around them?
The observed power spectrum of redshifted 21cm fluctuations is known to be sensitive to the astrophysical properties of the galaxies that drove reionization. Thus, detailed measurements of the 21cm power spectrum and its evolution could lead to measurements of the properties of early galaxies that are otherwise inaccessible. In this paper, we study the effect of mass and redshift dependent escape fractions of ionizing radiation on the ability of forthcoming experiments to constrain galaxy formation via the redshifted 21cm power spectrum. We use a model for reionization which combines the hiera…
The highly redshifted 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen has become recognized as a unique probe of cosmology from relatively low redshifts (z ~ 1) up through the Epoch of Reionization (z ~ 8) and even beyond. To date, most work has focused on recovering the spherically averaged power spectrum of the 21 cm signal, since this approach maximizes the signal-to-noise in the initial measurement. However, like galaxy surveys, the 21 cm signal is affected by redshift space distortions, and is inherently anisotropic between the line-of-sight and transverse directions. A measurement of this anisotropy can …
One of the next decade's most exciting prospects is to explore the cosmic "dark ages," during which the first stars in the Universe formed, with the 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen. At z>6, this light redshifts into the low-frequency radio regime and can be observed with new generations of wide-field arrays. These experiments have the potential to observe enormous volumes and to improve both cosmological and astrophysical constraints dramatically. In this white paper, we describe how the next decade will see the first steps toward unlocking this potential, allowing us to answer two key question…
We discuss the prospects of using the redshifted 21~cm emission from neutral hydrogen in the post-reionization epoch to study our universe. The main aim of the article is to highlight the efforts of Indian scientists in this area with the SKA in mind. It turns out that the intensity mapping surveys from SKA can be instrumental in obtaining tighter constraints on the dark energy models. Cross-correlation of the HI intensity maps with the Ly$α$ forest data can also be useful in measuring the BAO scale.
In addition to being a probe of Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionization astrophysics, the 21cm line at $z>6$ is also a powerful way to constrain cosmology. Its power derives from several unique capabilities. First, the 21cm line is sensitive to energy injections into the intergalactic medium at high redshifts. It also increases the number of measurable modes compared to existing cosmological probes by orders of magnitude. Many of these modes are on smaller scales than are accessible via the CMB, and moreover have the advantage of being firmly in the linear regime (making them easy to model theor…
The epoch of reionization, when photons from early galaxies ionized the intergalactic medium about a billion years after the Big Bang, is the last major phase transition in the Universe's history. Measuring the characteristics of the transition is important for understanding early galaxies and the cosmic web and for modeling dwarf galaxies in the later Universe. But such measurements require probes of the intergalactic medium itself. Here we describe how the 21-cm line of neutral hydrogen provides a powerful probe of the reionization process and therefore important constraints on both the gala…
Global signal in the redshifted hydrogen 21-cm line from the Dark Ages and Cosmic Dawn: Dependence on the nature of dark matter and modeling of first light
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will offer an unprecedented view onto the early Universe, using interferometric observations of the redshifted 21cm line. The 21cm line probes the thermal and ionization state of the cosmic gas, which is governed by the birth and evolution of the first structures in our Universe. Here we show how the evolution of the 21cm signal will allow us to study when the first generations of galaxies appeared, what were their properties, and what was the structure of the intergalactic medium. We highlight qualitative trends which will offer robust insights into the early …
Understanding properties of the first sources in the Universe using the redshifted \HI ~21-cm signal is one of the major aims of present and upcoming low-frequency experiments. We investigate the possibility of imaging the redshifted 21-cm pattern around the first sources during the cosmic dawn using the SKA1-low. We model the \HI ~21-cm image maps, appropriate for the SKA1-low, around the first sources consisting of stars and X-ray sources within galaxies. In addition to the system noise, we account also for the astrophysical foregrounds by adding them to the signal maps. We find that after s…
Redshifted 21cm-line signal from neutral hydrogens in the intergalactic medium (IGM) gives a direct probe of the epoch of reionization (EoR). In this paper, we investigate the potential of the variance and skewness of the probability distribution function of the 21cm brightness temperature for constraining EoR models. These statistical quantities are simple, easy to calculate from the observed visibility and thus suitable for the early exploration of the EoR with ongoing telescopes such as the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) and LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR). We show, by performing Fisher analys…
The Experiment to Detect the Global Epoch of Reionization Signature (EDGES) recently reported a strong 21-cm absorption signal relative to the cosmic microwave background at $z \sim 18$. While its anomalous amplitude may indicate new physics, in this work we focus on the timing of the signal, as it alone provides an important constraint on galaxy formation models. Whereas rest-frame ultraviolet luminosity functions (UVLFs) over a broad range of redshifts are well fit by simple models in which galaxy star formation histories track the assembly of dark matter halos, we find that these same model…
Observations of the redshifted 21-cm line of atomic hydrogen have resulted in several upper limits on the 21-cm power spectrum and a tentative detection of the sky-averaged signal at $z\sim17$. Made with the EDGES Low-Band antenna, this claim was recently disputed by the SARAS3 experiment, which reported a non-detection and is the only available upper limit strong enough to constrain cosmic dawn astrophysics. We use these data to constrain a population of radio-luminous galaxies $\sim 200$ million years after the Big Bang ($z\approx 20$). We find, using Bayesian data analysis, that the data di…
In the absence of complex astrophysical processes that characterize the reionization era, the 21-cm emission from neutral hydrogen (HI) in the post-reionization epoch is believed to be an excellent tracer of the underlying dark matter distribution. Assuming a background cosmology, it is modelled through (i) a bias function b(k,z), which relates HI to the dark matter distribution and (ii) a mean neutral fraction (x_{HI}) which sets its amplitude. In this paper, we investigate the nature of large scale HI bias. The post-reionization HI is modelled using gravity only N-Body simulations and a suit…
In this Letter, the Evans and Koratkar Atlas of Hubble Space Telescope Faint Object Spectrograph Spectra of Active Galactic Nuclei and Quasars is used to study the redward asymmetry in CIV broad emission lines (BELs). It is concluded that there is a highly significant correlation between the spectral index from 10 GHz to 1350 $Å$ and the amount of excess luminosity in the red wing of the CIV BEL ($>99.9999%$ significance level for the full sample and the radio loud subsample independently, but no correlation is found for the radio quiet subsample). This is interpreted as a correlation between …
In this paper, we study scenarios of the super-Eddington accretion onto black holes at high redshifts $z > 10$, which are expected to be seeds to evolve to supermassive black holes until redshift $z \sim 7$. For an initial mass, $M_{\rm BH, ini} \lesssim 2 \times 10^{3} M_{\odot}$ of a seed BH, we definitely need the super-Eddington accretion, which can be applicable to both astrophysical and primordial origins. Such an accretion disk inevitably emitted high-energy photons which had heated the cosmological plasma of the inter-galactic medium continuously from high redshifts. In this case, the …
We analyze correlations between the first letter of the name of an author and the number of citations their papers receive. We look at simple mean counts, numbers of highly-cited papers, and normalized h-indices, by letter. To our surprise, we conclude that orthographically senior authors produce a better body of work than their colleagues, despite some evidence of discrimination against them.
We identify a new cosmological signal, the Doppler-boosted Cosmic Infrared Background (DB-CIB), arising from the peculiar motion of the galaxies whose thermal dust emission source the cosmic infrared background (CIB). This new observable is an independent probe of the cosmic velocity field, highly analogous to the well-known kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect. Interestingly, DB-CIB does not suffer from the 'kSZ optical depth degeneracy', making it immune from the complex astrophysics of galaxy formation. We forecast that the DB-CIB effect is detectable in the cross-correlation of CCAT-P…
A1689-zD1 is one of the most distant galaxies, discovered with the aid of gravitational lensing, providing us with an important opportunity to study galaxy formation in the very early Universe. In this study, we report the detection of [C II]158$μ$m and [O III]88$μ$m emission lines of A1689-zD1 in the ALMA Bands 6 and 8. We measure the redshift of this galaxy as $z_{\rm{sys}}=7.133\pm0.005$ based on the [C II] and [O III] emission lines, consistent with that adopted by Bakx et al. (2021). The observed $L_{[\rm{O\,III]}}/L_{[\rm{C\,II]}}$ ratio is $2.09\pm0.09$, higher than most of the local ga…
The massive neutrinos of the Cosmic Neutrino Background (C$ν$B) are fundamental ingredients of the radiation-dominated early universe and are important non-relativistic probes of the large-scale structure formation in the late universe. The dominant source of anisotropies in the neutrino flux distribution on the sky are highly amplified integrals of metric perturbations encountered during the non-relativistic phase of the C$ν$B. This paper numerically compares the line-of-sight methods for computing C$ν$B anisotropies with the Einstein-Boltzmann hierarchy solutions in linear theory for a range…
