Tag: Intergalactic medium

A composite stellar spectrum (2-D above, 1-D below) using all publicly available low-resolution multi-object spectra with redshifts above 5. The observations make are a plethora of intergalactic medium (IGM), stellar, and interstellar medium (ISM) features visible. Indeed, amongst these are the Lyman break/Balmer break at short wavelengths (where radiation is absorbed by neutral gas), rest-frame ultraviolet emission lines (that probe electron densities, gas-phase abundances, metallicities, and ionisation parameters of the emitting star-forming galaxies and their environments), and optical line emission. Moreover, this plethora of features allows for characterisations of IGM opacity, stellar ages and masses, and gas-phase metallicities, to only name a few. Dashed vertical lines represent the positions of all detected emission (grey) and absorption (black) lines. The individual spectra are all obtained by the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), an instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and wavelength coverage. The plot is adapted from Roberts-Borsani et al. (2024).

This graphic was developed during the breakthrough workshop ‘The Chronology of the Very Early Universe According to JWST: The First Billion Years‘ at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) in Bern, Switzerland.

• Series: ISSI Breakthrough Workshop 2024 (issibt24)
• Creators: Guido Roberts-Borsani & Fabio Crameri
• This version: 09.08.2024
• License: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
• Specific citation: This graphic by Guido Roberts-Borsani and Fabio Crameri published in ISSI Breakthrough Workshop team (2024) is available via the open-access s-ink.org repository.
• Related reference: ISSI Breakthrough Workshop 2024 team (2024, pre-print), arXiv, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2405.21054

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