Cosmic infrared background and early stellar populations

Abstract

Cosmic infrared background (CIB) contains information about galaxy luminosities over the entire history of the Universe and can be a powerful diagnostic of the early populations otherwise inaccessible to telescopic studies. Its measurements are very difficult because of the strong IR foregrounds from the Solar system and the Galaxy. Nevertheless, substantial recent progress in measuring the CIB and its structure has been made. The measurements now allow to set significant constraints on early galaxy evolution and, perhaps, even detect the elusive Population III era. We discuss briefly the theory behind the CIB, review the latest measurements of the CIB and its structure, and discuss their implications for detecting and/or constraining the first stars and their epochs.

Invited review to appear in proceedings of Irvine workshop "First light and reionization", eds. E. Barton & A. Cooray. New Astronomy Reviews, in press

References in corpus (4)

• The Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) for the Spitzer Space Telescope
• The 24 Micron Source Counts in Deep Spitzer Surveys
• Tracing the first stars with cosmic infrared background fluctuations
• IRTS observation of the near-infrared extragalactic background light

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Extra-galactic background light measurements from the far-UV to the far-IR from deep ground and space-based galaxy counts
• GAMA/DEVILS: Constraining the cosmic star-formation history from improved measurements of the 0.3-2.2 micron Extragalactic Background Light
• Effects of Cosmic Infrared Background on High Energy Delayed Gamma-Rays from Gamma-Ray Bursts
• Cross-correlation studies as a probe of reionization physics