LOCATING THE “MISSING” BARYONS WITH EXTRAGALACTIC DISPERSION MEASURE ESTIMATES

By M. McQuinn. 2013

218 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently, Thornton and coworkers confirmed a class of millisecond radio bursts likely of extragalactic origin that is well-suited for estimating dispersion measures (DMs). We calculate the probability distribution of DM(z) in different models for how the cosmic baryons are distributed (both analytically and with cosmological simulations). We show that the distribution of DM is quite sensitive to whether the “missing” baryons lie around the virial radius of 1011–1013 M☉ halos or further out, which is not easily constrained with other observational techniques. The intrinsic contribution to DM from each source could complicate studies of the extragalactic contribution. This difficulty is avoided by stacking based on the impact parameter to foreground galaxies. We show that a stacking analysis using a sample of ∼100 DM measurements from arcminute-localized, z ≳ 0.5 sources would place interesting constraints at 0.2–2 halo virial radii on the baryonic mass profile surrounding different galaxy types. Conveniently for intergalactic studies, sightlines that intersect intervening galactic disks should be easily identified owing to scattering. A detectable level of scattering may also result from turbulence in the circumgalactic medium.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dde7c69010f0adcaa431a4a40a27fed56cc42684

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Fast radio bursts at the dawn of the 2020s (2021, unknown): “As originally shown by McQuinn (2014), from a sample of around 100 well-localised and redshift-identified FRBs, it should be possible to distinguish between different baryonic matter halo distributions in a way that is currently impossible to do by other means.”
The CHIME Fast Radio Burst Project: System Overview (2018, background): “The FRB DM distribution, for example, has been suggested to be informative of the location of the so-called missing cosmic baryons (McQuinn 2014) and could provide a new probe of the three dimensional clustering of matter in the universe (Masui & Sigurdson 2015).”
The physics of fast radio bursts (2021, background): “McQuinn (2014) considered the effect of inhomogeneity with three models for halo gas profile of the ionized baryons [280].”
CHIME/FRB Discovery of Eight New Repeating Fast Radio Burst Sources (2019, background): “…of the nearest repeating FRBs. Based on the estimated DM contribution of the Milky Way and halo discussed above, the maximum excess DM for Source 1 is ∼100 pc cm−3, corresponding to a maximum redshift of ∼0.11 (distance of ∼500 Mpc), assuming an IGM-DM relation of DM' 900z pc cm−3 (McQuinn 2014).”
Host Galaxy Properties and Offset Distributions of Fast Radio Bursts: Implications for Their Progenitors (2020, background): “…the studies of the “cosmic web” between galaxies (Macquart et al. 2020; Simha et al. 2020), the diffuse ionized gas in extragalactic halos (McQuinn 2014; Prochaska & Zheng 2019; Prochaska et al. 2019a), and the interstellar and circumgalactic media of their hosts (Tendulkar et al. 2017;…”
An X-ray burst from a magnetar enlightening the mechanism of fast radio bursts (2020, methodology): “and host contributions from the total value: DM (IG) = DM - DM (GAL) - DM (HALO) - DM (HOST) . Once DM (IG) is obtained, the FRB source distance is calculated using the relation DM IG = 900 z pc cm-3 [45]. The resulting redshift value is then used to estimate the distance following the cosmology as ”
Hubble Tension: The Evidence of New Physics (2023, methodology): “Hagstotz et al. [152] presented the first H0 estimation, H0 = 62.3± 9.1 km/s/Mpc, using the nine then available FRBs. Employing the probability distributions of DMIGM [199] and DMhost [200] from the IllustrisTNG simulation, a more compact result, H0 = 68.81+4.99−4.33 km/s/Mpc, was given by Wu et al.”