Cosmological Reionization

Abstract

In popular cosmological scenarios, some time beyond a redshift of 10, stars within protogalaxies created the first heavy elements; these systems, together perhaps with an early population of quasars, generated the ultraviolet radiation and mechanical energy that reheated and reionized the cosmos. The history of the Universe during and soon after these crucial formative stages is recorded in the all-pervading intergalactic medium (IGM), which contains most of the ordinary baryonic material left over from the big bang. Throughout the epoch of structure formation, the IGM becomes clumpy and acquires peculiar motions under the influence of gravity, and acts as a source for the gas that gets accreted, cools, and forms stars within galaxies, and as a sink for the metal enriched material, energy, and radiation which they eject.

LateX, 13 pages, 4 figures, slightly revised version (corrected several typos), to appear in Phil. Trans. R. Soc. London A (2000) 358

References in corpus (1)

• Zero-Metallicity Stars and the Effects of the First Stars on Reionization

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Halo Formation in Warm Dark Matter Models
• Formation of Primordial Stars in a LCDM Universe
• Lyman Continuum Emission from Galaxies at z~3.4
• Early Metal Enrichment of the Intergalactic Medium by Pregalactic Outflows
• Early Metal Enrichment by Pregalactic Outflows: II. Simulations of Blow-away
• On the Threshold of the Reionization Epoch
• Constraints from the Lyman alpha forest power spectrum
• The Parkes quarter-Jansky flat-spectrum sample 3. Space density and evolution of QSOs
• Constraints on the UV metagalactic emissivity using the LyA forest
• A New Method to Directly Measure the Jeans Scale of the Intergalactic Medium Using Close Quasar Pairs
• Secondary CMB anisotropies from the kinetic SZ effect
• Early Preheating and Galaxy Formation