High Mass X-ray Binaries and the Cosmic 21-cm Signal: Impact of Host Galaxy Absorption

Abstract

By heating the intergalactic medium (IGM) before reionization, X-rays are expected to play a prominent role in the early Universe. The cosmic 21-cm signal from this "Epoch of Heating" (EoH) could serve as a clean probe of high-energy processes inside the first galaxies. Here we improve on prior estimates of this signal by using high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations to calculate the X-ray absorption due to the interstellar medium (ISM) of the host galaxy. X-rays absorbed inside the host galaxy are unable to escape into the IGM and contribute to the EoH. We find that the X-ray opacity through these galaxies can be approximated by a metal-free ISM with a typical column density of log[N / cm^-2] = 21.4 +0.40-0.65. We compute the resulting 21-cm signal by combining these ISM opacities with public spectra of high-mass X-ray binaries (thought to be important X-ray sources in the early Universe). Our results support "standard scenarios" in which the X-ray heating of the IGM is inhomogeneous, and occurs before the bulk of reionization. The large-scale (k ~ 0.1/Mpc) 21-cm power reaches a peak of ~100 mK^2 at z = 10 - 15, with the redshift depending on the cosmic star formation history. This is in contrast to some recent work, motivated by the much larger X-ray absorption towards local HMXBs inside the Milky Way. Our main results can be reproduced by approximating the X-ray emission from HMXBs with a power-law spectrum with energy index alpha = 1, truncated at energies below 0.5 keV.

9 pages, 8 figures, submitted to MNRAS

References in corpus (33)

• Cosmology at Low Frequencies: The 21 cm Transition and the High-Redshift Universe
• Binary Population and Spectral Synthesis Version 2.1: construction, observational verification and new results
• Formation of Double Neutron Star Systems
• Observational constraints on the progenitors of core-collapse supernovae : the case for missing high mass stars
• Ultraluminous X-Ray Sources
• Model-independent evidence in favor of an end to reionization by z~6
• The Evolution of Compact Binary Star Systems
• Efficient Simulations of Early Structure Formation and Reionization
• Formation of Precessing Jets by Tilted Black-hole Discs in 3D General Relativistic MHD Simulations
• Progenitors of gravitational wave mergers: Binary evolution with the stellar grid-based code ComBinE
• The Formation of Population III Binaries from Cosmological Initial Conditions
• On the formation history of Galactic double neutron stars
• The Global 21 Centimeter Background from High Redshifts
• 21 cm fluctuations from inhomogeneous X-ray heating before reionization
• Dynamics of stellar black holes in young star clusters with different metallicities - II. Black hole-black hole binaries
• Forming short-period Wolf-Rayet X-ray binaries and double black holes through stable mass transfer
• The cosmic merger rate of neutron stars and black holes
• Double neutron stars: merger rates revisited
• Stellar Mergers Are Common
• Towards a unified view of inhomogeneous stellar winds in isolated supergiant stars and supergiant high mass X-ray binaries
• Zooming on the internal structure of $z\simeq 6$ galaxies
• Simulating cosmic metal enrichment by the first galaxies
• Shock-powered light curves of luminous red novae as signatures of pre-dynamical mass loss in stellar mergers
• Detection of additional Be+sdO systems from IUE spectroscopy
• An Overabundance of Black Hole X-Ray Binaries in the Galactic Center from Tidal Captures
• Unveiling the nature of dark matter with high redshift 21 cm line experiments
• The Argo Simulation: II. The Early Build-up of the Hubble Sequence
• An INTEGRAL overview of High Mass X-ray Binaries: classes or transitions?
• Heating the IGM by X-rays from Population III Binaries in High Redshift Galaxies
• Using final black hole spins and masses to infer the formation history of the observed population of gravitational wave sources
• Magnetic fields of neutron stars in X-ray binaries
• Missing cosmic metals revealed by X-ray absorption towards distant sources
• Formation Timescales for High-Mass X-ray Binaries in M33

Cited by in corpus (66)

• Inferring the astrophysics of reionization and cosmic dawn from galaxy luminosity functions and the 21-cm signal
• Modeling the Radio Background from the First Black Holes at Cosmic Dawn: Implications for the 21 cm Absorption Amplitude
• What does the first highly-redshifted 21-cm detection tell us about early galaxies?
• HERA Phase I Limits on the Cosmic 21-cm Signal: Constraints on Astrophysics and Cosmology During the Epoch of Reionization
• The Impact of the First Galaxies on Cosmic Dawn and Reionization
• X-ray Binary Luminosity Function Scaling Relations for Local Galaxies Based on Subgalactic Modeling
• Emulating Simulations of Cosmic Dawn for 21cm Power Spectrum Constraints on Cosmology, Reionization, and X-ray Heating
• Constraining the intergalactic medium at $z\approx$ 9.1 using LOFAR Epoch of Reionization observations
• Deep learning from 21-cm tomography of the Cosmic Dawn and Reionization
• 21CMMC with a 3D light-cone: the impact of the co-evolution approximation on the astrophysics of reionisation and cosmic dawn
• A census of ultraluminous X-ray sources in the local Universe
• The Metallicity Dependence of the High-Mass X-ray Binary Luminosity Function
• A tale of two sites -- I: Inferring the properties of minihalo-hosted galaxies from current observations
• Interpreting LOFAR 21-cm signal upper limits at z~9.1 in the context of high-z galaxy and reionisation observations
• Results from EDGES High-Band: III. New Constraints on Parameters of the Early Universe
• The Epoch of IGM heating by early sources of X-rays
• Unique Signatures of Population III Stars in the Global 21-cm Signal
• The Radio Scream from Black Holes at Cosmic Dawn: A Semi-Analytic Model for the Impact of Radio Loud Black-Holes on the 21 cm Global Signal
• An Effective Model for the Cosmic-Dawn 21-cm Signal
• Evaluating the QSO contribution to the 21-cm signal from the Cosmic Dawn
• A tale of two sites -- II: Inferring the properties of minihalo-hosted galaxies with upcoming 21-cm interferometers
• Minimum size of 21-cm simulations
• Exploring the likelihood of the 21-cm power spectrum with simulation-based inference
• 21cmEMU: an emulator of 21cmFAST summary observables
• Properties of reionization-era galaxies from JWST luminosity functions and 21-cm interferometry
• Constraining the X-ray heating and reionization using 21-cm power spectra with Marginal Neural Ratio Estimation
• Elevated Hot Gas and High-Mass X-ray Binary Emission in Low Metallicity Galaxies: Implications for Nebular Ionization and Intergalactic Medium Heating in the Early Universe
• 21cm signal sensitivity to dark matter decay
• Structure Formation and the Global 21-cm Signal in the Presence of Coulomb-like Dark Matter-Baryon Interactions
• Population III X-ray Binaries and their Impact on the Early Universe
• X-ray ionization of the intergalactic medium by quasars
• 21cmfish: Fisher-matrix framework for fast parameter forecasts from the cosmic 21-cm signal
• Inferring Astrophysics and Dark Matter Properties from 21cm Tomography using Deep Learning
• BEoRN: A fast and flexible framework to simulate the epoch of reionisation and cosmic dawn
• The importance of stochasticity in determining galaxy emissivities and UV LFs during cosmic dawn and reionization
• How informative are summaries of the cosmic 21-cm signal?
• The role of Pop III stars and early black holes in the 21cm signal from Cosmic Dawn
• Black Holes and Neutron Stars in Nearby Galaxies: Insights from NuSTAR
• Cosmological implications of the composite spectra of galactic X-ray binaries constructed using MAXI data
• The spin-temperature dependence of the 21cm -- LAE cross-correlation
• Modelling Population III stars for semi-numerical simulations
• Variations in fundamental constants at the cosmic dawn
• Probing Small Scale Primordial Power Spectrum with 21cm Line Global Signal
• The first all-sky survey of star-forming galaxies with eROSITA: Scaling relations and a population of X-ray luminous starbursts
• The First Billion Years in Seconds: An Effective Model for the 21-cm Signal with Population III Stars
• A galaxy-free phenomenological model for the 21-cm power spectrum during reionization
• On the X-ray Spectral Energy Distributions of Star-Forming Galaxies: the 0.3-30 keV Spectrum of the Low-Metallicity Starburst Galaxy VV 114
• The Next Generation X-ray Galaxy Survey with eROSITA
• Optimal, fast, and robust inference of reionization-era cosmology with the 21cmPIE-INN
• An X-ray Detection of Star Formation In a Highly Magnified Giant Arc
• The EDGES measurement disfavors an excess radio background during the cosmic dawn
• Thermal and Reionisation History within a Large-Volume Semi-Analytic Galaxy Formation Simulation
• Effects of feedback-free starburst galaxies on the 21-cm signal and reionization history
• Efficient simulation of discrete galaxy populations and associated radiation fields during the first billion years
• Impact of ultraluminous X-ray sources on photoabsorption in the first galaxies
• X-ray Binaries in External Galaxies
• Analysing the Epoch of Reionization with three-point correlation functions and machine learning techniques
• Galactic wind X-ray heating of the intergalactic medium during the Epoch of Reionization
• Impact of cosmic rays on the global 21-cm signal during cosmic dawn
• Calibrating excursion set reionization models to approximately conserve ionizing photons
• Massive black holes in high-redshift Lyman Break Galaxies
• Fisher matrix forecasts on the astrophysics of galaxies during the epoch of reionisation from the 21-cm power spectra
• Monitoring the X-ray Variability of Bright X-ray Sources in M33
• 21 cm Cosmology Sensitivity to Small-Scale Structure: Warm vs Neutrino-Interacting Dark Matter
• The 21-cm signal from the Cosmic Dawn: metallicity dependence of high mass X-ray binaries
• Sample Variance Denoising in Cylindrical 21-cm Power Spectra