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T.T. Fang, G.L. Bryan, C.R. Canizares (Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Most of the baryons at low and moderate redshift could reside in the intergalactic medium in the form of highly ionized gas at temperatures of T ~106 - 108 K. The H-like and He-like ions of the heavy elements (like O, Si, Fe) could produce absorption features - the so-called ``X-ray Forest'' - in the X-ray spectrum of a background quasar (Perna & Loeb 1998, Hellsten et al. 1998). In this work we give a semi-analytic calculation of the X-ray forest distribution in various cosmologies based on the Press-Schechter formalism, following Perna & Loeb (1998). We then perform N-body simulations and find that numerical and analytic results fit very well. We will have Chandra GTO observations for two high redshift quasars and compare them with our predictions.
This work is supported in part by NASA contract NAS 8-38249.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: fangt@space.mit.edu