Constraint on intergalactic dust from thermal history of intergalactic medium

Abstract

This Letter investigates the amount of dust in the intergalactic medium (IGM). The dust photoelectric heating can be the most efficient heating mechanism in the IGM where the density is very small and there are a lot of hard ultraviolet photons. Comparing the observational thermal history of IGM with a theoretical one taking into account the dust photoelectric heating, we can put an upper limit on the dust-to-gas ratio, $\mathcal{D}$, in the IGM. Since the rate of the dust photoelectric heating depends on the size of dust, we find the following results: If the grain size is $\ga 100$ Å, $\mathcal{D}$ at $z\sim 3$ is $\la 1/100$ Galactic value corresponding to $Ω_{\rm dust}^{\rm IGM}\la 10^{-5}$. On the other hand, if the grain size is as small as $\sim 10$ Å, $\mathcal{D}$ is $\la 1/1000$ Galactic value corresponding to $Ω_{\rm dust}^{\rm IGM}\la 10^{-6}$.

5 pages, 2 figures; accepted for publication in MNRAS pink pages

References in corpus (2)

• Detection of He II reionization in the SDSS quasar sample
• Extreme Ultraviolet Absorption Lines in LyA Forest Absorbers and the Oxygen Abundance in the Intergalactic Medium

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• Cosmological simulation with dust formation and destruction
• The origin of dust in galaxies revisited: the mechanism determining dust content
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• The Impact of Cosmic Dust on Supernova Cosmology
• Photo-heating and the fate of hard photons during the reionisation of HeII by quasars
• A New Method to Directly Measure the Jeans Scale of the Intergalactic Medium Using Close Quasar Pairs
• Amount of intergalactic dust: constraints from distant supernovae and thermal history of intergalactic medium
• Constraints on intergalactic dust from quasar colours
• Limits on non-canonical heating and turbulence in the intergalactic medium from the low redshift Lyman-alpha forest
• Dust abundance and grain size in galaxy halos
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• Redshift-distance relations from type Ia supernova observations. New constraints on grey dust models
• Distribution of Dust around Galaxies: An Analytic Model
• Cosmological X-ray Scattering from Intergalactic Dust
• Shattering as a source of small grains in the circum-galactic medium