Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2006-02-23
New Astron.Rev. 50 (2006) 29-34
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
9 pages, 4 figures. Summary of the talk given at the "First Light & Reionization" workshop at UC Irvine, May 2005. The publish
Scientific paper
10.1016/j.newar.2005.11.002
Cosmological hydrodynamic simulations have significantly improved over the past several years, and we have already shown that the observed properties of Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs) at z=3 can be explained well by the massive galaxies in the simulations. Here we extend our study to z=6 and show that we obtain good agreement for the LBGs at the bright-end of the luminosity function (LF). Our simulations also suggest that the cosmic star formation rate density has a peak at z= 5-6, and that the current LBG surveys at z=6 are missing a significant number of faint galaxies that are dimmer than the current magnitude limit. Together, our results suggest that the universe could be reionized at z=6 by the Pop II stars in ordinary galaxies. We also estimate the LF of Lyman-alpha emitters (LAEs) at z=6 by relating the star formation rate in the simulation to the Ly-alpha luminosity. We find that the simulated LAE LFs agree with the observed data provided that the net escape fraction of Ly-alpha photon is f_{Ly-alpha} <= 0.1. We investigate two possible scenarios for this effect: (1) all sources in the simulation are uniformly dimmer by a factor of 10 through attenuation, and (2) one out of ten LAEs randomly lights up at a given moment. We show that the correlation strength of the LAE spatial distribution can possibly distinguish the two scenarios.
Cen Renyue
Furlanetto Steven R.
Hernquist Lars
Nagamine Kentaro
Night Christopher
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