Cosmological Hydrogen Reionization with Three‐dimensional Radiative Transfer

Abstract

We present new calculations of the inhomogeneous process of cosmological reionization by carefully following the radiative transfer in precomputed hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy formation. These new computations represent an important step on the way toward fully self-consistent and adaptive calculations, which will eventually cover the enormous range of scales from sizes of individual minihalos to the mean free path of ionizing photons in the postoverlap universe. The goal of such simulations is to include enough realistic physics to accurately model the formation of early structures and the end of the dark ages. Our new calculations demonstrate that the process by which the ionized regions percolate the universe is complex and that the idea of voids being ionized before overdense regions is too simplistic. It seems that observational information pertaining to the reionization epoch may now be in our grasp, through the detection of Gunn-Peterson troughs at z ~ 6. If so, then the comparison of information from many lines of sight with simulations such as ours may allow us to disentangle details of the ionization history and trace the early formation of structure.