Recognizing the First Radiation Sources Through Their 21-cm Signature

Abstract

At the beginning of the reionization epoch, radiation sources produce fluctuations in the redshifted 21-cm background. We show that different types of sources (such as miniquasars, Pop II and III stars, supernovae, etc.) produce distinct signatures in the 21-cm signal radial profiles and statistical fluctuations, through which they can be identified. Further, we show that the 21-cm signal from X-ray emitting sources is much easier to observe than was expected, due to a previously neglected pumping mechanism.

4 pages, 4 figures, accepted by ApJL

Cited by in corpus (37)

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• The Effects of Dark Matter Decay and Annihilation on the High-Redshift 21 cm Background
• The Epoch of Reionization
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• The Physics and Early History of the Intergalactic Medium
• Decoding the X-ray Properties of Pre-Reionization Era Sources
• Time-evolution of ionization and heating around first stars and miniquasars
• Spin Exchange Rates in Electron-Hydrogen Collisions
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• Unique Signatures of Population III Stars in the Global 21-cm Signal
• Current models of the observable consequences of cosmic reionization and their detectability
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• Heating of the Intergalactic Medium by Primordial Miniquasars
• Spin Exchange Rates in Proton-Hydrogen Collisions
• Impact of Dark Matter Annihilation on the High-Redshift Intergalactic Medium
• Spatially Extended 21 cm Signal from Strongly Clustered UV and X-Ray Sources in the Early Universe
• Detecting Early Galaxies Through Their 21-cm Signature
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• Enhanced Detectability of Pre-reionization 21-cm Structure
• A WENO algorithm for radiative transfer with resonant scattering: the time scale of the Wouthuysen-Field Coupling
• Probing the growth of supermassive black holes at z>6 with LOFAR
• 21 cm Signals from Early Ionizing Sources
• A practical theorem on using interferometry to measure the global 21-cm signal
• Lensing of 21cm Absorption "Halos" of $z\sim$20-30 First Galaxies
• The Infancy of Cosmic Reionization
• Luminosity Bias (II): The Cosmic Web of the First Stars