Cosmic reionization: Who is to blame?
What caused the universe to shift from neutral to ionized as it expanded and cooled? Today, we examine clues that indicate it could have been the result of rapid star formation from the earliest galaxies.
What caused the universe to shift from neutral to ionized as it expanded and cooled? Today, we examine clues that indicate it could have been the result of rapid star formation from the earliest galaxies.
By searching for Lyman-alpha emission lines, astronomers have confirmed one of the most distant galaxies yet, helping shed light on the very earliest galaxies and their formation.
Our special guest astrophysical classics series on Gunn & Peterson 1965 concludes with an examination — and apprehension — of the suspects responsible for reionization.
Gas in the Universe went from being mostly neutral to mostly ionized as the first galaxies formed, and the signature of this process is imprinted in quasar spectra. The review of the classic paper by Gunn & Peterson continues in this second in the three-part series.
This guest post, the first in a three-part series, reviews the classic article by Gunn & Peterson (1965). This paper proposed several fundamental ideas in cosmology, including using distant quasars as “flashlights” to observe the diffuse gas between galaxies.
The BOSS project of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is exploiting the Lyman-α forest in distant quasars to make a 3D map of neutral hydrogen in the early universe.