Correlations between 21-cm radiation and the cosmic microwave background from active sources

Neutral hydrogen is ubiquitous, absorbing and emitting 21-cm radiation throughout much of the Universe's history. Active sources of perturbations, such as cosmic strings, would generate simultaneous perturbations in the distribution of neutral hydrogen and in the cosmic microwave background (CM...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 2010-09, Vol.407 (2), p.1116-1122
Main Authors: Berndsen, Aaron, Pogosian, Levon, Wyman, Mark
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cosmic background radiation
Cosmology
cosmology: observations
dark ages
dark ages, reionization, first stars
first stars
large scale structure of Universe
reionization
Universe
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Neutral hydrogen is ubiquitous, absorbing and emitting 21-cm radiation throughout much of the Universe's history. Active sources of perturbations, such as cosmic strings, would generate simultaneous perturbations in the distribution of neutral hydrogen and in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation from recombination. Moving strings would create wakes leading to 21-cm brightness fluctuations, while also perturbing CMB light via the Gott–Kaiser–Stebbins effect. This would lead to spatial correlations between the 21-cm and CMB anisotropies. Passive sources, like inflationary perturbations, predict no cross-correlations prior to the onset of reionization. Thus, observation of any cross-correlation between CMB and 21-cm radiation from dark ages would constitute evidence for new physics. We calculate the cosmic string-induced correlations between CMB and 21-cm radiation and evaluate their observability.
ISSN:0035-8711
1365-2966
DOI:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.16951.x