The earliest galaxies seen in 21 cm line absorption

TL;DR

This paper models 21 cm absorption lines from early universe structures like minihalos and dwarf galaxies, exploring their profiles, effects of ionized regions, and potential for probing the universe's thermal history with upcoming radio telescopes.

Contribution

It provides detailed modeling of 21 cm absorption features from early structures, considering coupling physics and the impact of ionized regions, to aid future observations.

Findings

Horn-like line profiles due to infalling gas velocities.

Large HII regions create absorption troughs instead of lines.

Detection prospects vary with background sources and X-ray background presence.

Abstract

We investigate the 21 cm absorption lines produced by non-linear structures during the early stage of reionization, i.e. the starless minihalos and the dwarf galaxies. After a detailed modelling of their properties, with particular attention to the coupling physics, we determine their 21 cm absorption line profiles. The infalling gas velocity around minihalos/dwarf galaxies strongly affects the line shape, and with the low spin temperatures outside the virial radii of the systems, gives rise to horn-like line profiles. The optical depth of a dwarf galaxy is reduced for lines of sight penetrating through its HII region, and especially, a large HII region created by a dwarf galaxy with higher stellar mass and/or a top-heavy initial mass function results in an optical depth trough rather than an absorption line. We compute synthetic spectra of 21 cm forest for both high redshift quasars and radio afterglows of gamma ray bursts (GRBs). Even with the planned SKA, radio afterglows of most if not all GRBs would still be too dim to be the background sources for high resolution (1 kHz) observations, but absorption lines can be easily detected towards a high-z quasar. Broadband observation against GRB afterglows can also be used to reveal the evolving 21 cm signal from both minihalos and dwarf galaxies if there was no X-ray background or it was extremely weak, but it becomes difficult if an early X-ray background existed. Hence the 21 cm absorption could be a powerful probe of the presence/intensity of the X-ray background and the thermal history of the early universe.