1997/01/01 by R. A. Croft, Croft, R AC, David H. Weinberg +5
Engineering · #Astrophysics and Astronomy #Calibration and Measurement Techniques
paper · doi:10.7275/2075
openalex publication_date 1997/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/21
In gravitational instability models, \lya absorption arises from a continuous fluctuating medium, so that spectra provide a non-linear one-dimensional ``map'' of the underlying density field. We characterise this continuous absorption using statistical measures applied to the distribution of absorbed flux. We describe two simple members of a family of statistics which we apply to simulated spectra in order to show their sensitivity as probes of cosmological parameters (H0, Ω, the initial power spectrum of matter fluctuations) and the physical state of the IGM. We make use of SPH simulation results to test the flux statistics, as well as presenting a preliminary application to Keck HIRES data.