No Arabic abstract
The most distant quasars known, at redshifts z=6, generally have properties indistinguishable from those of lower-redshift quasars in the rest-frame ultraviolet/optical and X-ray bands. This puzzling result suggests that these distant quasars are evolved objects even though the Universe was only seven per cent of its current age at these redshifts. Recently one z=6 quasar was shown not to have any detectable emission from hot dust, but it was unclear whether that indicated different hot-dust properties at high redshift or if it is simply an outlier. Here we report the discovery of a second quasar without hot-dust emission in a sample of 21 z=6 quasars. Such apparently hot-dust-free quasars have no counterparts at low redshift. Moreover, we demonstrate that the hot-dust abundance in the 21 quasars builds up in tandem with the growth of the central black hole, whereas at low redshift it is almost independent of the black hole mass. Thus z=6 quasars are indeed at an early evolutionary stage, with rapid mass accretion and dust formation. The two hot-dust-free quasars are likely to be first-generation quasars born in dust-free environments and are too young to have formed a detectable amount of hot dust around them.
We study the formation of first molecules, negative Hydrogen ions and molecular ions in model of the Universe with cosmological constant and cold dark matter. The cosmological recombination is described in the framework of modified model of the effective 3-level atom, while the kinetics of chemical reactions in the framework of the minimal model for Hydrogen, Deuterium and Helium. It is found that the uncertainties of molecular abundances caused by the inaccuracies of computation of cosmological recombination are about 2-3%. The uncertainties of values of cosmological parameters affect the abundances of molecules, negative Hydrogen ions and molecular ions at the level of up to 2%. In the absence of cosmological reionization at redshift $z=10$ the ratios of abundances to the Hydrogen one are $3.08times10^{-13}$ for $H^-$, $2.37times10^{-6}$ for $H_2$, $1.26times10^{-13}$ for $H_2^+$, $1.12times10^{-9}$ for $HD$ and $8.54times10^{-14}$ for $HeH^+$.
The most distant quasar yet discovered sets constraints on the formation mechanism of black holes. Its light spectrum has tantalizing features that are expected to be observed before the reionization epoch ended.
Vorticity is ubiquitous in nature however, to date, studies of vorticity in cosmology and the early universe have been quite rare. In this paper, based on a talk in session CM1 of the 13th Marcel Grossmann Meeting, we consider vorticity generation from scalar cosmological perturbations of a perfect fluid system. We show that, at second order in perturbation theory, vorticity is sourced by a coupling between energy density and entropy gradients, thus extending a well-known feature of classical fluid dynamics to a relativistic cosmological framework. This induced vorticity, sourced by isocurvature perturbations, may prove useful in the future as an additional discriminator between inflationary models.
Cosmic inflation is commonly assumed to be driven by quantum fields. Quantum mechanics predicts phenomena such as quantum fluctuations and tunneling of the field. Here we show an example of a quantum interference effect which goes beyond the semi-classical treatment and which may be of relevance in the early universe. We study the quantum coherent dynamics for a tilted, periodic potential, which results in genuine quantum oscillations of the inflaton field, analogous to Bloch oscillations in condensed matter and atomic systems. Our results show that quantum interference phenomena may be of relevance in cosmology.
We present recent advances in theoretical studies of the formation and evolution of dust in primordial supernovae (SNe) that are considered to be the main sources of dust in the early universe. Being combined with the results of calculations of dust formation in the ejecta of Population III SNe, the investigations of the evolution of newly formed dust within supernova remnants (SNRs) show that smaller grains are predominantly destroyed by sputtering in the shocked gas, while larger grains are injected into the ambient medium. The mass of dust grains surviving the destruction in SNRs reaches up to 0.1--15 $M_odot$, which is high enough to account for the content of dust observed for the host galaxies of quasars at $z > 5$. In addition, the transport of dust formed in the ejecta causes the formation of low-mass stars in the dense shell of primordial SNRs and affects the elemental composition of those stars. We also show that the flat extinction curve is expected in the high-redshift universe where SNe are the possible sources of dust.