TAPIR Seminar

Impact of inhomogeneous blazar heating on the intergalactic medium

Astrid Lamberts, Postdoctoral Researcher, Center for Gravitation, Cosmology and Astrophysics, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,

The intergalactic medium (IGM) contains 90% of the baryons of the Universe and is the reservoir for structure formation. Acting as a calorimeter, its thermal evolution traces the conditions for structure formation and evolution. It was recently shown that TeV blazar heat up the IGM as the gamma-rays they produce turn into pairs which lose their kinetic energy to the surrounding medium through plasma instabilities. Assuming uniform heating, TeV blazar heating increases the temperature of the IGM and produces an inverted temperature-density relation in underdense regions. In this talk I will review the main features of TeV blazar heating. Then, I will detail the method we recently developed to take into account heating fluctuations due to clustering. We find that blazar heating is more complex than initially assumed. The resulting temperature-density relation presents a wide scatter, which is suggested by some recent Ly alpha observations.

Event Sponsors:

Theoretical AstroPhysics Including Relativity and Cosmology (TAPIR) - More events from this Sponsor

For more information, please contact JoAnn Boyd by phone at 4280 or by email at [email protected].