Small-scale anisotropy of the cosmic background radiation and scattering by cloudy plasma

Abstract

If the first stars formed soon after decoupling of baryons from the thermal cosmic background radiation (CBR), the radiation may have been last scattered in a cloudy plasma. We discuss the resulting small-scale anisotropy of the CBR in the limit where the plasma clouds are small compared to the mean distance between clouds along a line of sight. This complements the perturbative analysis valid for mildly nonlinear departures from homogeneity at last scattering. We conclude that reasonable choices for the cloud parameters imply CBR anisotropy consistent with the present experimental limits, in agreement with the perturbative approach. This means the remarkable isotropy of the CBR need not contradict the early small-scale structure formation predicted in some cosmogonies.

23 pages, LaTeX, 1 Postscript figure, uses epsf.sty and aaspp4.sty

References in corpus (4)

• Discovery of a Supernova Explosion at Half the Age of the Universe and its Cosmological Implications
• The Impact of Inhomogeneous Reionization on Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy
• Secondary CMB anisotropies in a universe reionized in patches
• An Upper Limit to Arcminute Scale Anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation at 142 GHz

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