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Cosmology

Photons from dwarf galaxy zap hydrogen

Nature volume 529, pages 159–160 (2016)Cite this article

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The detection of photons sufficiently energetic to ionize neutral hydrogen, coming from a compact, star-forming galaxy, offers clues to how the first generation of galaxies may have reionized hydrogen gas in the early Universe. See Letter p.178

Most of the ordinary matter in the Universe is found not in stars, but in the diffuse gas between galaxies: the intergalactic medium (IGM), which is mainly hydrogen. This gas is almost completely ionized, and has been so since the formation of the first stars and galaxies a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. But few details are known about the sources of the radiation that ionized the gas, or how this radiation escaped from its source galaxies. On page 178 of this issue, Izotov et al.1 report the detection of ionizing radiation from a star-forming dwarf galaxy in the local Universe, which may clarify the escape question.

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Figure 1: Escape of ionizing radiation from a galaxy.

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Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Dawn K. Erb is at the Leonard E. Parker Center for Gravitation, Cosmology and Astrophysics, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53211, USA.

    Dawn K. Erb

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  1. Dawn K. Erb
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Correspondence to Dawn K. Erb.

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Erb, D. Photons from dwarf galaxy zap hydrogen. Nature 529, 159–160 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/529159a

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