Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 454, Issue 1, Pages 681-697Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stv2020
Keywords
galaxies: high-redshift; intergalactic medium; quasars: absorption lines; dark ages, reionization, first stars
Categories
Funding
- BIS National E-infrastructure capital grant [ST/K001590/1, ST/K00042X/1]
- STFC capital grants [ST/H008861/1, ST/H00887X/1, ST/H008519/1, ST/K00087X/1]
- STFC DiRAC Operations grant [ST/K00333X/1]
- STFCDiRAC Operations grant [ST/K003267/1]
- Durham University
- Isaac Newton Studentship
- Cambridge Trust
- STFC
- FP7 ERC Advanced Grant Emergence [320596]
- STFC [ST/K000373/1, ST/H008861/1, ST/M006948/1, ST/M007073/1, ST/M007065/1, ST/M007006/1, ST/J005673/1, ST/I00162X/1, ST/H008519/1, ST/K001590/1, ST/M00418X/1, ST/H00887X/1, ST/K00333X/1, ST/K00042X/1, ST/K000985/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/J005673/1, ST/K000985/1, ST/K000373/1, ST/K00333X/1, ST/M006948/1, ST/K00042X/1, ST/M007006/1, ST/M007065/1, ST/I00162X/1, ST/H008519/1, ST/M00418X/1, ST/K001590/1, ST/H008861/1, ST/M007073/1, ST/H00887X/1] Funding Source: researchfish
Ask authors/readers for more resources
QSO near zones are an important probe of the ionization state of the intergalactic medium (IGM) at z similar to 6-7, at the end of reionization. We present here high-resolution cosmological 3D radiative transfer simulations of QSO environments for a wide range of host halo masses, 10(10-12.5) M-circle dot. Our simulated near zones reproduce both the overall decrease of observed near-zone sizes at 6 < z < 7 and their scatter. The observable near-zone properties in our simulations depend only very weakly on the mass of the host halo. The size of the HII region expanding into the IGM is generally limited by (super-)Lyman Limit systems loosely associated with (low-mass) dark matter haloes. This leads to a strong dependence of near-zone size on direction and drives the large observed scatter. In the simulation centred on our most massive host halo, many sightlines show strong red damping wings even for initial volume averaged neutral hydrogen fractions as low as similar to 10(-3). For QSO lifetimes long enough to allow growth of the central supermassive black hole while optically bright, we can reproduce the observed near zone of ULAS J1120+0641 only with an IGM that is initially neutral. Our results suggest that larger samples of z > 7 QSOs will provide important constraints on the evolution of the neutral hydrogen fraction and thus on how late reionization ends.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available