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Publication Details
AFRICAN RESEARCH NEXUS
SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN RESEARCH
earth and planetary sciences
Gas clumping in self-consistent reionization models
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 427, No. 3, Year 2012
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Description
We use a suite of cosmological hydrodynamic simulations including a self-consistent treatment for inhomogeneous reionization to study the impact of galactic outflows and photoionization heating on the volume-averaged recombination rate of the intergalactic medium (IGM). By incorporating an evolving ionizing escape fraction and a treatment for self-shielding within Lyman limit systems, we have run the first simulations of 'photon-starved' reionization scenarios that simultaneously reproduce observations of the abundance of galaxies, the optical depth to electron scattering of cosmic microwave background photons τes and the effective optical depth to Lyα absorption at z = 5. We confirm that an ionizing background reduces the clumping factor C by more than 50percent by smoothing moderately overdense (Δ = 1-100) regions. Meanwhile, outflows increase clumping only modestly. The clumping factor of ionized gas is much lower than the overall baryonic clumping factor because the most overdense gas is self-shielded. Photoionization heating further suppresses recombinations if reionization heats gas above the canonical 10000K. Accounting for both effects within our most realistic simulation, C rises from <1 at z > 10 to 3.3 at z = 6. We show that incorporating temperature- and ionization-corrected clumping factors into an analytical reionization model reproduces the numerical simulation's τes to within 10percent. Finally, we explore how many ionizing photons are absorbed during the process of heating filaments by considering the overall photon cost of reionization in analytical models that assume that the IGM is heated at different redshifts. For reionization redshifts of 9-10, cold filaments boost the reionization photon budget by ∼1 photon per hydrogen atom. © 2012 The Authors Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2012 RAS.
Authors & Co-Authors
Finlator, Kristian M.
United States, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Barbara
Peng Oh, Siang Peng
United States, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Barbara
Özel, Feryal
United States, Tucson
The University of Arizona
Dav́e, Romeel
United States, Tucson
The University of Arizona
Statistics
Citations: 103
Authors: 4
Affiliations: 2
Identifiers
Doi:
10.1111/j.1365-2966.2012.22114.x
ISSN:
00358711