1998/11/11 by Philip R. Maloney, J. Bland-Hawthorn, Joss Bland‐Hawthorn +2
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/9811164
5 pages, 1 figure. To appear in the Third Stromlo Symposium: The Galactic Halo (ASP Conference Series), in press
arxiv created 1998/11/11 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
We investigate how much warm (T ∼ 106 K) gas may exist in a Local Group corona, and, in particular, whether such a corona could be detected indirectly through its ionizing radiation. We calculate the non-LTE cooling of warm, low-density gas and the resulting ionizing photon emissivities for a range of metallicities. In principle a corona can produce a photon flux which significantly exceeds the cosmic ionizing background. However, the additional constraints which can be imposed on intragroup gas rule out models which produce detectable ionizing photon fluxes at the Milky Way's distance from the Local Group barycenter.