1997/02/19 by Lam Hui, Nickolay Y. Gnedin, Hui, Lam +3
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Electromagnetic Compatibility and Noise Suppression #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/9702167
3 pages Latex file, 2 ps figures, use sprocl.sty, to appear in the Proceedings of the 18th Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics
arxiv created 1997/02/19 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
Absorption lines in the Lyman-alpha forest can be thought of as peaks in neutral hydrogen density along lines of sight. The column density distribution (the number density of absorption lines as a function of column density) is then a statistic of density peaks, which contains information about the underlying power spectrum. In particular, we show that the slope of the distribution provides a measure of power on scales smaller than those probed by studies of present-day large scale structure.