PIRSA:15020082

The Epoch of Reionization and the Lyman-alpha Forest

(2015). The Epoch of Reionization and the Lyman-alpha Forest. Perimeter Institute. https://pirsa.org/15020082

The Epoch of Reionization and the Lyman-alpha Forest. Perimeter Institute, Feb. 24, 2015, https://pirsa.org/15020082 

          @misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:15020082,
            doi = {10.48660/15020082},
            url = {https://pirsa.org/15020082},
            author = {},
            keywords = {Cosmology},
            language = {en},
            title = {The Epoch of Reionization and the Lyman-alpha Forest},
            publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
            year = {2015},
            month = {feb},
            note = {PIRSA:15020082 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
          }
Talk number
PIRSA:15020082
Collection
Talk Type
Subject
Abstract

An exciting and largely unexplored frontier in observational and theoretical cosmology is to understand the properties of the universe between 400,000 years and one billion years after the big bang. Notably, the first galaxies formed in this time period, perhaps a few hundred million years after the big bang.  These galaxies strongly influenced the gas in their surroundings as well as the formation of subsequent generations of galaxies. The early galaxies emitted ultraviolet light and ionized "bubbles" of hydrogen gas around them.  These ionized bubbles grew, merged, and eventually filled the entire volume of the universe with ionized hydrogen in a process known as reionization. Understanding this process will constrain the properties of the first luminous sources, and fill in a significant gap in our story of structure formation, whereby the universe transitions from simple initial conditions to its present day complexity. I will briefly summarize current observational constraints and describe some new ideas for better determining when the reionization process completed using existing Lyman-alpha forest data.