Marie E. Machacek et al. 2000 ApJ 532 118 doi:10.1086/308551
Marie E. Machacek1, Greg L. Bryan2,7, Avery Meiksin3, Peter Anninos4, Daniel Thayer5, Michael Norman5,8 and Yu Zhang6
Show affiliationsWe investigate the properties of the Lyα forest as predicted by numerical simulations for a range of currently viable cosmological models. This is done in order to understand the dependencies of the forest on cosmological parameters. Focusing on the redshift range from 2 to 4, we show that (1) most of the evolution in the distributions of optical depth, flux, and column density can be understood by simple scaling relations; (2) the shape of optical depth distribution is a sensitive probe of the amplitude of density fluctuations on scales of a few hundred kpc; and (3) the mean of the b distribution (a measure of the width of the absorption lines) is also very sensitive to fluctuations on these scales and decreases as they increase. We perform a preliminary comparison to observations, where available. A number of other properties are also examined, including the evolution in the number of lines, the two-point flux distribution, and the He II opacity.
hydrodynamics; large-scale structure of universe; methods: numerical; quasars: absorption lines
Issue 1 (2000 March 20)
Received 1999 May 28, accepted for publication 1999 November 8
Marie E. Machacek et al. 2000 ApJ 532 118
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