The Reionization of the Universe and the Photoevaporation of Cosmological Minihalos

Abstract

The first sources of ionizing radiation to condense out of the dark and neutral IGM sent ionization fronts sweeping outward through their surroundings, overtaking other condensed objects and photoevaporating them. This feedback of universal reionization on cosmic structure formation is demonstrated here by gas dynamical simulations, including radiative transfer, for a cosmological minihalo of dark matter and baryons exposed to an external source of ionizing radiation, either starlight or quasar light, just after the passage of the global ionization front created by the source.

To appear in "The Seventh Texas-Mexico Conference on Astrophysics: Flows, Blows, and Glows," eds. W. Lee and S. Torres-Peimbert, RevMexAA (Serie de Conferencias), in press (2000). 6 pages, 11 figures