Lara Arielle Phillips

Is There Still Room for Warm/Hot Gas? Simulating the X-Ray Background Spectrum

At low redshifts, a census of the baryons in all known reservoirs falls a factor of two to four below the total baryon density predicted from Big Bang nucleosynthesis arguments and observed light element ratios. Recent cosmological hydrodynamic simulations suggest that a significant fraction of these missing baryons could be in the form of warm/hot gas in the filaments and halos within which most field galaxies are embedded. With the release of source count results from Chandra and recent detections of this gas in O VI quasar absorption lines, it becomes interesting to examine the predictions and limits placed on this component of the X-ray background (XRB). We have used new hydrodynamical simulations to predict the total X-ray spectrum from the gas in the 100 eV to 10 keV range. We find that, when uncertainties in the normalization of the observed XRB and the value of Omega_b are taken into account, our results are consistent with current observational limits placed on the contribution of emission from gas to the XRB. In the 0.5-2 keV range, we expect the contribution from this component to be 0.63 10^{-12} erg s^-1 cm^-2 deg^-2 or between 6% and 18% of the extragalactic surface brightness. The peak fraction occurs in the 0.5-1 keV range where the predicted line emission mirrors a spectral bump seen in the latest ASCA/ROSAT XRB data.

Proposed SMEX to spectrally analyze the diffuse x-ray background: The Baryonic Extragalactic Structure Tracer (BEST)

The Baryonic Extragalactic Structure Tracer (BEST) is a SMEX-class mission that is designed to map the hot million-degree diffuse intergalactic and interstellar gas with high spectral resolution. It consists of an imaging X-ray spectrometer that can, over a 1-2 year mission, map the entire sky and conduct deep pointed observations of selected regions to profoundly extend our understanding of hot matter in the Universe. BEST will be able to detect and characterize the missing baryons in the current epoch, which are primarily in moderately overdense intergalactic regions and are predicted to account for 10 - 20% of the soft X-ray background, and also determine the properties of the hot Galactic halo and the hot Galactic gas, crucial to understanding the evolution and dynamics of our Galaxy and its interstellar medium.