2003/12/19 by James Bolton, Avery Meiksin, Martin White · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2004.07567.x
published as Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc.348:L43,2004 · 5 pages, 7 figures, letter accepted for publication in MNRAS
arxiv created 2003/12/19 · openalex publication_date 2004/02/20 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We use a probabilistic method to compute the propagation of an ionization front corresponding to the reionization of the intergalactic medium in a Λ-cold dark matter (ΛCDM) cosmology, including both hydrogen and helium. The effects of radiative transfer substantially boost the temperature of the ionized gas over the case of uniform reionization. The resulting temperature–density relation of the ionized gas is both non-monotonic and multiple-valued, reflecting the non-local character of radiative transfer and suggesting that a single polytropic relation between local gas density and temperature is a poor description of the thermodynamical state of baryons in the post-reionization universe.