Observing the influence of growing black holes on the pre-reionization IGM

TL;DR

This paper explores how early black holes influence the ionization and thermal state of the intergalactic medium during the universe's reionization era, proposing observable signals for current and future telescopes.

Contribution

It models the impact of accreting black holes on the IGM and predicts observable signatures in radio and optical wavelengths, considering recent baryon cooling effects.

Findings

Influence regions for hydrogen extend up to 1 Mpc around accreting BHs.

21cm brightness temperature around growing BHs can reach ~15 mK.

Hα line from BH surroundings detectable by JWST with high S/N.

Abstract

We consider cosmological implications of the formation of first stellar size black holes (BHs) in the universe. Such BHs form and grow by accretion in minihaloes of masses $\simeq 10^5-10^7~M_\odot$, and emit non-thermal radiation which impact the ionization and thermal state of the IGM. We compute the implications of this process. We show that the influence regions for hydrogen increase to 10kpc (physical length) for non-growing BHs to more than 0.3--1Mpc for accreting BHs, the influence regions are ten times smaller for singly ionized helium. We consider three possible observables from the influence zones around accreting BHs during $8.5<z<25$: HI 21cm line, hyperfine line of $^3$HeII, and HI recombination lines. We show that the 21cm emitting region around a growing BH could produce brightness temperatures $\simeq 15$mK across an evolving structure of 1Mpc in size with hot, ionized gas closer to the BH and much cooler in outer regions. We show that the ongoing and upcoming radio interferometers such as LOFAR and SKA1-LOW might be able to detect these regions. $^3$HeII emission from regions surrounding the growing BH is weak: the corresponding brightness temperatures reaches tens of nano-Kelvin, which is below the range of upcoming SKA1-MED. We show that for growing BHs H$\alpha$ line could be detected by JWST with $S/N=10$ in $10^4$~seconds of integration. In light on the recent EDGES result, we show that with additional cooling of baryons owing to collision with dark matter the HI signal could be enhanced by more than an order of magnitude.