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PAPER-64 CONSTRAINTS on REIONIZATION. II. the TEMPERATURE of the Z = 8.4 INTERGALACTIC MEDIUM Jonathan C

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PAPER-64 CONSTRAINTS on REIONIZATION. II. the TEMPERATURE of the Z = 8.4 INTERGALACTIC MEDIUM Jonathan C The Astrophysical Journal, 809:62 (11pp), 2015 August 10 doi:10.1088/0004-637X/809/1/62 © 2015. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. PAPER-64 CONSTRAINTS ON REIONIZATION. II. THE TEMPERATURE OF THE z = 8.4 INTERGALACTIC MEDIUM Jonathan C. Pober1,19, Zaki S. Ali2, Aaron R. Parsons2,3, Matthew McQuinn4, James E. Aguirre5, Gianni Bernardi6,7,8, Richard F. Bradley9,10,11, Chris L. Carilli12,13, Carina Cheng2, David R. DeBoer3, Matthew R. Dexter3, Steven R. Furlanetto14, Jasper Grobbelaar6, Jasper Horrell6, Daniel C. Jacobs15,19, Patricia J. Klima10, Saul A. Kohn5, Adrian Liu2,16, David H. E. MacMahon3, Matthys Maree6, Andrei Mesinger17, David F. Moore5, Nima Razavi-Ghods13, Irina I. Stefan13, William P. Walbrugh6, Andre Walker6, and Haoxuan Zheng18 1 Physics Dept., U. Washington, Seattle, WA, USA 2 Astronomy Dept., University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA 3 Radio Astronomy Lab., University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA 4 Astronomy Dept., University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA 5 Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA 6 Square Kilometre Array South Africa (SKA SA), Pinelands, South Africa 7 Dept. of Physics and Electronics, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa 8 Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, USA 9 Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA 10 National Radio Astronomy Obs., Charlottesville, VA, USA 11 Dept. of Astronomy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA 12 National Radio Astronomy Obs., Socorro, NM, USA 13 Cavendish Lab., Cambridge, UK 14 Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA 15 School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State U., Tempe, AZ, USA 16 Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, Berkeley, CA, USA 17 Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy 18 Dept. of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA Received 2015 February 27; accepted 2015 June 26; published 2015 August 11 ABSTRACT We present constraints on both the kinetic temperature of the intergalactic medium (IGM) at z = 8.4, and on models for heating the IGM at high-redshift with X-ray emission from the first collapsed objects. These constraints are derived using a semi-analytic method to explore the new measurements of the 21 cm power spectrum from the Donald C. Backer Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of Reionization (PAPER), which were presented in a companion paper, Ali et al. Twenty-one cm power spectra with amplitudes of hundreds of mK2 can be generically produced if the kinetic temperature of the IGM is significantly below the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB); as such, the new results from PAPER place lower limits on the IGM temperature at z = 8.4. Allowing for the unknown ionization state of the IGM, our measurements find the IGM temperature to be above ≈5 K for neutral fractions between 10% and 85%, above ≈7 K for neutral fractions between 15% and 80%, or above ≈10 K for neutral fractions between 30% and 70%. We also calculate the heating of the IGM that would be provided by the observed high redshift galaxy population, and find that for most models, these galaxies are sufficient to bring the IGM temperature above our lower limits. However, there are significant ranges of parameter space that could produce a signal ruled out by the PAPER measurements; models with a steep drop-off in the star formation rate density at high redshifts or with relatively low values for the X-ray to star formation rate efficiency of high redshift galaxies are generally disfavored. The PAPER measurements are consistent with (but do not constrain) a hydrogen spin temperature above the CMB temperature, a situation which we find to be generally predicted if galaxies fainter than the current detection limits of optical/NIR surveys are included in calculations of X-ray heating. Key words: dark ages, reionization, first stars – galaxies: high-redshift – intergalactic medium 1. INTRODUCTION finding high-redshift galaxies (Ouchi et al. 2010; Tilvi et al. 2010; Hibon et al. 2011). However, these observations still Up until very recently, observational cosmology has lacked a principally detect the rare, most luminous galaxies, and cannot direct probe of the conditions of the universe between the probe the population of more numerous, fainter galaxies. epoch of recombination and the birth of modern galaxies. One of the biggest unsolved questions in cosmology and Recent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope have galaxy formation is the issue of how early galaxies feed back found nearly a thousand putative galaxies at a redshift of 7 or into the universe and influence the formation of the next ( ) above see Bouwens et al. 2015 for a recent compilation , generation of galaxies. From a combination of cosmic using the Lyman break drop-out technique. Narrow band microwave background (CMB; Larson et al. 2011; Planck searches for Lyα emitters have also proven successful at Collaboration et al. 2015) observations and quasar absorption spectra measurements at high redshift (Fan et al. 2006; 19 ) National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral McGreer et al. 2015 , we know that ultraviolet photons from Fellow. the first luminous objects reionized the intergalactic medium 1 The Astrophysical Journal, 809:62 (11pp), 2015 August 10 Pober et al. (IGM) somewhere between redshifts »6 and 15. However, it spectrum) is the result of a large number of improvements over has been determined that the observed high-redshift galaxy the previous analysis. The measurements in Paper I come from population cannot produce enough ionizing photons to a 64-element PAPER array, as opposed to the 32-element array complete the reionization of the universe before z = 6 used in Parsons et al. (2014). There are also several significant (Choudhury et al. 2008; Finkelstein et al. 2012; Kuhlen & changes to the data processing and analysis compared with that ) Faucher-Giguère 2012; Robertson et al. 2013 . Therefore, to in Parsons et al. (2014). First, the application of the understand cosmic reionization, heating, and other feedback Omnical23 redundant calibration package (Zheng et al. 2014) effects on the IGM, we require a probe of global conditions to the visibility data substantially improves the calibration and which captures the impact of the unobservable low-mass reduces the variance among measurements from physically galaxies. redundant baselines. Second, the application of optimal fringe The 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen offers such a probe. By rate filtering has the effect of upweighting higher signal-to- observing the 21 cm signal as a function of redshift, one can potentially trace the evolution of ionization, temperature, and noise regions on the sky and can limit the contamination from density fluctuations on a cosmic scale (for reviews of 21 cm foreground emission at the northern and southern horizons. cosmology, see Furlanetto et al. 2006; Morales & Wyithe 2010 Finally, an improved power spectrum estimator using and Pritchard & Loeb 2012). At present, telescopes such as the the optimal quadratic estimator formalism (Tegmark 1997; LOw Frequency ARray (van Haarlem et al. 2013; Yatawatta Liu & Tegmark 2011; Dillon et al. 2013) in conjunction et al. 2013)20, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA; with the delay spectrum approach (Parsons et al. 2012b) is Lonsdale et al. 2009; Bowman et al. 2013; Tingay et al. used to downweight spectral eigenmodes that show significant 2013)21, and the Donald C. Backer Precision Array for Probing foreground contamination. In a significant change from the the Epoch of Reionization (PAPER; Parsons et al. 2010)22 are Parsons et al. (2014) analysis, only the covariance between conducting lengthy observational campaigns to detect the frequency channels within a single baseline’s measurements is spatial power spectrum of 21 cm fluctuations from the Epoch of used in the weighting, as opposed to the covariance removal Reionization (EoR). techniques that focused on inter-baseline covariance. See Paper Initial measurements from a 32-element PAPER instrument I for a detailed description of each of these three new in 2011 were recently used to place an upper limit on the 21 cm techniques. power spectrum at redshift 7.7 at a wavenumber of The new power spectrum measurements from Paper I are -1 ( ) k = 0.27h Mpc Parsons et al. 2014 . This upper limit was shown in Figure 1 (equivalent to Figure 18 in Paper I). The left stringent enough to place constraints on the temperature of the hand panel shows P(k) in mK(21h- Mpc) 3, while the right hand IGM, requiring some mechanism for heating the intergalactic 2 2 gas, and ruling out a universe in which the thermal evolution of panel plots the dimensionless power spectrum D ()k in mK .In the IGM was purely adiabatic since decoupling from the CMB. both panels, black points represent the new measurements with The goal of the present work is to expand on this analysis by 2σ error bars derived from bootstrapping, while vertical dashed using the more stringent upper limit from Ali et al. (2015) black lines represent the nominal horizon limit, beyond which (hereafter, “Paper I”) and by using a semi-analytic method to there should be no contamination from flat spectrum fore- model the signal, allowing for a more complete exploration of ground emission (Parsons et al. 2012b; Pober et al. 2013). the parameter space. This approach improves over Parsons Also shown in the right hand panel are the expected theoretical et al. (2014) and Paper I, which constrained the spin 2σ noise limit (i.e., 95% of points should fall under this line if temperature of the IGM by treating the brightness contrast the measurements are consistent with thermal noise; dashed- between the spin and CMB temperatures as a multiplicative cyan), a model 21 cm power spectrum at 50% ionization from scalar on the amplitude of an analytic “patchy” reionization Lidz et al.
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