The observed properties of high redshift galaxies depend on the underlying foreground distribution of large scale structure, which distorts their intrinsic properties via gravitational lensing. We focus on the regime where the dominant contribution o
riginates from a single lens and examine the statistics of gravitational lensing by a population of virialized and non-virialized structures using sub-mm galaxies at z ~ 2.6 and Lyman-break galaxies at redshifts z ~ 6 - 15 as the background sources. We quantify the effect of lensing on the luminosity function of the high redshift sources, focusing on the intermediate and small magnifications, mu < 2, which affect the majority of the background galaxies, and comparing to the case of strong lensing. We show that, depending on the intrinsic properties of the background galaxies, gravitational lensing can significantly affect the observed luminosity function even when no obvious strong lenses are present. Finally, we find that in the case of the Lyman-break galaxies it is important to account for the surface brightness profiles of both the foreground and the background galaxies when computing the lensing statistics, which introduces a selection criterion for the background galaxies that can actually be observed. Not taking this criterion into account leads to an overestimation of the number densities of very bright galaxies by nearly two orders of magnitude.
The redshifted 21-cm background is expected to be a powerful probe of the early Universe, carrying both cosmological and astrophysical information from a wide range of redshifts. In particular, the power spectrum of fluctuations in the 21-cm brightne
ss temperature is anisotropic due to the line-of-sight velocity gradient, which in principle allows for a simple extraction of this information in the limit of linear fluctuations. However, recent numerical studies suggest that the 21-cm signal is actually rather complex, and its analysis likely depends on detailed model fitting. We present the first realistic simulation of the anisotropic 21-cm power spectrum over a wide period of early cosmic history. We show that on observable scales, the anisotropy is large and thus measurable at most redshifts, and its form tracks the evolution of 21-cm fluctuations as they are produced early on by Lyman-a radiation from stars, then switch to X-ray radiation from early heating sources, and finally to ionizing radiation from stars. In particular, we predict a redshift window during cosmic heating (at z ~ 15), when the anisotropy is small, during which the shape of the 21-cm power spectrum on large scales is determined directly by the average radial distribution of the flux from X-ray sources. This makes possible a model-independent reconstruction of the X-ray spectrum of the earliest sources of cosmic heating.
We present the first complete calculation of the history of the inhomogeneous 21-cm signal from neutral hydrogen during the era of the first stars. We use hybrid computational methods to capture the large-scale distribution of the first stars, whose
radiation couples to the neutral hydrogen emission, and to evaluate the 21-cm signal from z ~ 15-35. In our realistic picture large-scale fluctuations in the 21-cm signal are sourced by the inhomogeneous density field and by the Ly-alpha and X-ray radiative backgrounds. The star formation is suppressed by two spatially varying effects: negative feedback provided by the Lyman-Werner radiative background, and supersonic relative velocities between the gas and dark matter. Our conclusions are quite promising: we find that the fluctuations imprinted by the inhomogeneous Ly-alpha background in the 21-cm signal at z ~ 25 should be detectable with the Square Kilometer Array.
