Cosmic ray heating of intergalactic medium: patchy or uniform?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how cosmic rays heat the intergalactic medium around high-redshift galaxies, analyzing the patchiness of heating and its dependence on cosmic ray diffusion, star formation rates, and redshift, with implications for galaxy formation and observability.

Contribution

It provides new constraints on cosmic ray diffusion coefficients affecting IGM heating patchiness and explores the impact of star formation rates on gas ionization and heating at different redshifts.

Findings

Uniform heating is likely for typical diffusion values at high redshift.

Low SFR can heat gas above CMB temperature within a few kpc of galaxies.

High SFR can suppress gas infall into massive galaxies at high redshift.

Abstract

We study the heating of the intergalactic medium (IGM) surrounding high redshift star forming galaxies due to cosmic rays (CR). We take into account the diffusion of low energy cosmic rays and study the patchiness of the resulting heating. We discuss the case of IGM heating around a high redshift minihalo ($z\sim 10\hbox{--}20$, M$\sim 10^5\hbox{--}10^7$ M$_\odot$),and put an upper limit on the diffusion coefficient $D\le 1\times 10^{26}$ cm$^2$ s$^{-1}$ for the heating to be inhomogeneous at $z\sim 10$ and $D\le 5\hbox{--}6 \times 10^{26}$ cm$^2$ s$^{-1}$ at $z\sim 20$. For typical values of $D$, our results suggest uniform heating by CR at high redshift, although there are uncertainties in magnetic field and other CR parameters. We also discuss two cases with continuous star formation, one in which the star formation rate (SFR) of a galaxy is high enough to make the IGM in the vicinity photoionized, and another in which the SFR is low enough to keep it neutral but high enough to cause significant heating by cosmic ray protons. In the neutral case (low SFR), we find that the resulting heating can make the gas hotter than the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation for $D < 10^{30}$ cm$^2$ s$^{-1}$, within a few kpc of the galaxy, and unlikely to be probed by near future radio observations. In the case of photoionized IGM (high SFR), the resulting heating of the gas in the vicinity of high redshift ($z\sim 4)$ galaxies of mass $\ge 10^{12}$ M$_\odot$ can suppress gas infall into the galaxy. At lower redshifts ($z\sim 0$), an SFR of $\sim 1$ M$_\odot$ yr$^{-1}$ can suppress the infall into galaxies of mass $\le 10^{10}$ M$_\odot$.