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Quasars at the Cosmic Dawn: effects on Reionization properties in cosmological simulations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 May 2018
Abstract
We study a model of cosmic reionization where quasars (QSOs) are the dominant source of ionizing photons at all relevant epochs. We employ a suite of adaptive hydrodynamical simulations post-processed with a multi-wavelength Monte Carlo radiative-transfer code and calibrate them in order to accurately reproduce the observed quasar luminosity function and emissivity evolution. Our results show that the QSO-only model fails in reproducing key observables linked to the Helium reionization, as the temperature evolution of the inter-galactic medium (IGM) and the HeII effective optical depth in synthetic Lyα spectra. Nevertheless, we find hints that an increased quasar contribution can explain recent measurements of a large inhomogeneity in the IGM at redshift z ≈ 5. Finally, we devise a method capable of constraining the QSOs contribution to the reionization from the properties of the HeII Lyα forest at z ≈ 3.5.
Keywords
- Type
- Contributed Papers
- Information
- Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 12 , Symposium S333: Peering towards Cosmic Dawn , October 2017 , pp. 56 - 59
- Copyright
- Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2018