Intergalactic pollution

Intergalactic Medium

Constraint on intergalactic dust from thermal history of intergalactic medium

We present a new constraint on the amount of dust in the intergalactic medium (IGM) at high redshift. We derive the thermal history of the IGM by taking account of the photoelectric heating by dust grains, and compare it with the thermal history suggested by observations of Lyman α forests. As a result, if the IGM grain size is & 100 Å, the dust-gas mass ratio of the IGM at z & 2 is . 1/100 Gal...

Intergalactic Star Formation

Star formation in interacting systems may take place in various locations, from the dust–enshrouded core of Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies to more unusual places such as the debris of colliding galaxies expelled into the intergalactic medium. Determining whether star-formation proceeds in the latter environment, far from the parent galaxies, in a similar way as in spiral disks has motivated th...

Intergalactic Hi Clouds

Neutral intergalactic clouds are so greatly out numbered by galaxies that their integral HI content is negligible in comparison to that contained in optically luminous galaxies. In fact, no HI cloud that is not associated with a galaxy or grouping of galaxies has yet been identified. This points to a causal relationship that relies on gravitational potentials that bind galaxies also being respo...

Warm - hot intergalactic baryons revealed

Several popular cosmological models predict that most of the baryonic mass in the local universe is located in filamentary and sheet-like structures associated with galaxy overdensities. This gas is expected to be gravitationally heated to ∼ 10 K and therefore emitting in the soft X-rays. We have detected diffuse soft X-ray structures in a high Galactic latitude ROSAT field after point source s...