Large Ly α opacity fluctuations and low CMB τ in models of late reionization with large islands of neutral hydrogen extending to z < 5.5

By Girish Kulkarni, L. Keating, M. Haehnelt, S. Bosman, E. Puchwein, J. Chardin, Dominique Aubert. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters, 2018

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High-redshift QSO spectra show large spatial fluctuations in the Ly-alpha opacity of the intergalactic medium on surprisingly large scales at z>~5.5. We present a radiative transfer simulation of cosmic reionization driven by galaxies that reproduces this large scatter and the rapid evolution of the Ly-alpha opacity distribution at 5 ~6. Reionization is complete at z=5.3 in our model, and 50% of the volume of the Universe is ionized at z=7. Agreement with the Ly-alpha forest data in such a late reionization model requires a rapid evolution of the ionizing emissivity of galaxies that peaks at z~6.8. The late end of reionization results in a large scatter in the photoionisation rate and the neutral hydrogen fraction at redshifts as low as z<~5.5 with large residual neutral 'islands' that can produce very long Gunn-Peterson troughs resembling those seen in the data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/234ef879cd7985a5f1fac230dcd9cc2af94a732f

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Conditions for Reionizing the Universe with a Low Galaxy Ionizing Photon Escape Fraction (2019, background): “We note that the curvature method employed by Becker et al. (2011) and Boera et al. (2014) probes the temperature at a characteristic gas density that is different from the mean.”