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Observations of the Lyman-alpha (Ly-$alpha$) forest may allow reionization to complete as late as $z sim 5.5$, provided the ionization state of the intergalactic medium (IGM) is sufficiently inhomogeneous at these redshifts. In this case, significantly neutral islands may remain amongst highly ionized gas with the ionized regions allowing some transmission through the Ly-$alpha$ forest. This possibility has the important virtue that it is eminently testable with existing Ly-$alpha$ forest data. In particular, we describe three observable signatures of significantly neutral gas in the $z sim 5.5$ IGM. We use mock quasar spectra produced from numerical simulations of reionization to develop these tests. First, we quantify how the abundance and length of absorbed regions in the forest increase with the volume-averaged neutral fraction in our reionization model. Second, we consider stacking the transmission profile around highly absorbed regions in the forest. If and only if there is significantly neutral gas in the IGM, absorption in the damping wing of the Ly-$alpha$ line will cause the transmission to recover slowly as one moves from absorbed to transmitted portions of the spectrum. Third, the deuterium Ly-$beta$ line should imprint a small but distinctive absorption feature slightly blueward of absorbed neutral regions in the Ly-$beta$ forest. We show that these tests can be carried out with existing Keck HIRES spectra at $z sim 5.5$, with the damping wing being observable for $< x_{text{HI}} >gtrsim 0.05$ and the deuterium feature observable with additional high-resolution spectra for $< x_{text{HI}} >gtrsim 0.2$.
High-redshift QSO spectra show large spatial fluctuations in the Ly-alpha opacity of the intergalactic medium on surprisingly large scales at z>~5.5. We present a radiative transfer simulation of cosmic reionization driven by galaxies that reproduces
A long (110 cMpc/$h$) and deep absorption trough in the Ly$alpha$ forest has been observed extending down to redshift 5.5 in the spectrum of ULAS J0148+0600. Although no Ly$alpha$ transmission is detected, Ly$beta$ spikes are present which has led to
We present a large spectroscopic campaign with Keck/MOSFIRE targeting Lyman-alpha emission (Ly$alpha$) from intrinsically faint Lyman-break Galaxies (LBGs) behind 12 efficient galaxy cluster lenses. Gravitational lensing allows us to probe the more a
We present the results of HI spectral stacking analysis of Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) observations targeting the COSMOS field. The GMRT data cube contains 474 field galaxies with redshifts known from the zCOSMOS-bright 10k catalogue. Spec
We use a large N-body simulation to examine the detectability of HI in emission at redshift z ~ 1, and the constraints imposed by current observations on the neutral hydrogen mass function of galaxies at this epoch. We consider three different models