articleMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical SocietyApr 18, 2022HYBRID OA

Hydrogen reionization ends by z = 5.3: Lyman-α optical depth measured by the XQR-30 sample

SESarah E. I. BosmanFBFrederick B. DaviesGDGeorge D. BeckerLCLaura C. KeatingRLR. L. Davies

Max Planck Institute for Astronomy · University of California, Riverside · +17 more institutions

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Abstract

ABSTRACT The presence of excess scatter in the Ly-α forest at z ∼ 5.5, together with the existence of sporadic extended opaque Gunn-Peterson troughs, has started to provide robust evidence for a late end of hydrogen reionization. However, low data quality and systematic uncertainties complicate the use of Ly-α transmission as a precision probe of reionization’s end stages. In this paper, we assemble a sample of 67 quasar sightlines at z > 5.5 with high signal-to-noise ratios of >10 per ≤15 km s−1 spectral pixel, relying largely on the new XQR-30 quasar sample. XQR-30 is a large program on VLT/X-Shooter which obtained deep (SNR > 20 per pixel) spectra of 30 quasars at z > 5.7. We…

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Topics & keywords

Topics
Keywords
  • Physics
  • Reionization
  • Astrophysics
  • Quasar
  • Opacity
  • Spectral line
  • Homogeneous
  • Redshift
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