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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Photon Underproduction Crisis, Juna A. Kollmeier, David H. Weinberg, Benjamin D. Oppenheimer, Francesco Haardt, Neal S. Katz, Rameel A. Dave, Mark Fardal, Piero Madau, Charles Danforth, Amanda B. Ford, Molly S. Peeples, Joseph Mcewen
The Photon Underproduction Crisis, Juna A. Kollmeier, David H. Weinberg, Benjamin D. Oppenheimer, Francesco Haardt, Neal S. Katz, Rameel A. Dave, Mark Fardal, Piero Madau, Charles Danforth, Amanda B. Ford, Molly S. Peeples, Joseph Mcewen
Neal S. Katz
We examine the statistics of the low-redshift Lyα forest from smoothed particle hydrodynamic simulations in light of recent improvements in the estimated evolution of the cosmic ultraviolet background (UVB) and recent observations from the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). We find that the value of the metagalactic photoionization rate (ΓHI) required by our simulations to match the observed properties of the low-redshift Lyα forest is a factor of five larger than the value predicted by state-of-the art models for the evolution of this quantity. This mismatch in ΓHI results in the mean flux decrement of the Lyα forest being overpredicted by …