Scintillation as a Probe of the Intergalactic Medium

Abstract

Most of the baryons in the low-redshift universe reside in a warm/hot component which is difficult to detect with standard absorption/emission line techniques. We propose to use quasar refractive scintillation as an useful, complementary probe of such ionized, intergalactic gas. In particular, an application to the case of the intracluster medium is presented. We show that clusters located at z approx 0.02 should produce a source rms intensity fluctuation at 50-100 GHz of several tens of percent and on time scales ranging from days to months, depending on the projected location of the source on the foreground cluster. However, in order to produce such a signal, the source needs to be very compact. This effect, if observed, can be used as an independent test of the baryonic mass fraction in clusters.

9 pages, 3 figures, accepted to MNRAS

References in corpus (5)

• Baryons in the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium
• Gas Stripping of Dwarf Galaxies in Clusters of Galaxies
• The discovery of a microarcsecond quasar: J1819+3845
• Anomalous Radio-Wave Scattering from Interstellar Plasma Structures
• Radio Scintillation due to Discontinuities in the Interstellar Plasma Density

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• Turbulence in the Intergalactic Medium
• Simulating intergalactic quasar scintillation
• Scatter broadening of compact radio sources by the ionized intergalactic medium: Prospects for detection with Space VLBI and the SKA
• Superdisks in Radio Galaxies: Jet-Wind Interactions
• Superdisks and the structural asymmetry of radio galaxies
• Discovery of X-shaped Morphology of the Giant Radio Galaxy GRG 0503-286