Bridging the Gap between Cosmic Dawn and Reionization favors Faint Galaxies-dominated Models

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that models dominated by faint galaxies can reconcile high-redshift 21cm observations with low-redshift reionization data, emphasizing the importance of low-mass halos and high photon escape fractions.

Contribution

It introduces a physically motivated semi-analytical model that aligns cosmic dawn and reionization constraints, consistent with advanced hydrodynamic simulations.

Findings

Faint galaxies with high escape fractions can explain EDGES and reionization data.

Low-mass halos lead to earlier and more extended reionization.

Models underestimate late-time measurements in massive systems.

Abstract

It has been claimed that traditional models struggle to explain the tentative detection of the 21\,cm absorption trough centered at $z\sim17$ measured by the EDGES collaboration. On the other hand, it has been shown that the EDGES results are consistent with an extrapolation of a declining UV luminosity density, following a simple power-law of deep Hubble Space Telescope observations of $4 < z < 9$ galaxies. We here explore the conditions by which the EDGES detection is consistent with current reionization and post-reionization observations, including the neutral hydrogen fraction at $z\sim6$--$8$, Thomson scattering optical depth, and ionizing emissivity at $z\sim5$. By coupling a physically motivated source model derived from radiative transfer hydrodynamic simulations of reionization to a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler, we find that it is entirely possible to reconcile the high-redshift (cosmic dawn) and low-redshift (reionization) existing constraints. In particular, we find that high contribution from low-mass halos along with high photon escape fractions are required to simultaneously reproduce cosmic dawn and reionization constraints. Our analysis further confirms that low-mass galaxies produce a flatter emissivity evolution, which leads to an earlier onset of reionization with gradual and longer duration, resulting in a higher optical depth. While our faint-galaxies dominated models successfully reproduce the measured globally averaged quantities over the first one billion years, they underestimate the late redshift-instantaneous measurements in efficiently star-forming and massive systems. We show that our (simple) physically-motivated semi-analytical prescription produces consistent results with the (sophisticated) state-of-the-art \thesan radiation-magneto-hydrodynamic simulation of reionization.