Mathematics – Logic
Scientific paper
Jan 2009
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21345408n&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #454.08; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.351
Mathematics
Logic
Scientific paper
About half of the baryons in the Universe are currently eluding detection. Hydrodynamical simulations for the formation of Large Scale Structures (LSSs), predict that these baryons, at z<1, are hiding in a tenuous (over-density 5-10) and hot (T 1e6 K) filamentary web of intergalactic matter: the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM). The WHIM has probably been progressively enriched with metals, during phases of intense starburst and AGN activity, up to possibly solar metallicity (Cen & Ostriker, 2006), and should therefore shine and/or absorb in in the soft X-ray band, via electronic transitions from the most abundant metals.
The importance of detecting and studying the WHIM lies not only in the possibility of finally making a complete census of all baryons in the Universe, but also in the possibility of (a) directly measuring the metallicity history of the Universe, and so investigating on metal-transport in the Universe and galaxy-IGM, AGN-IGM feedback mechanisms, (b) directly measuring the heating history of the Universe, and so understanding the process of LSS formation and shocks, and (c) performing cosmological parameter measurements through a 3D 2-point angular correlation function analysis of the WHIM filaments.
Detecting, and studying the WHIM with the current X-ray instrumentation however, is extremely challenging, because of the low sensitivity and resolution of the Chandra and XMM-Newton gratings, and the very low 'grasp' of all currently available imaging-spectrometers. IXO, instead, thanks to its large grating effective area (> 1000 cm2 at 0.5 keV) and high spectral resolution (R>2500 at 0.5 keV) will be perfectly suited to attack the problem in a systematic way. Here we demonstrate that high resolution gratings are crucial for these kind of studies and show that the IXO gratings will be able to detect more than 300-700 OVII WHIM filaments along about 70 lines of sight, in less than 0.7.
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