The shocking truth: The small contribution to hydrogen reionization from gravitational infall

Abstract

It is commonly thought that stars are responsible for reionizing the universe. However, deep searches for star-forming galaxies during the epoch of reionization have not yet found sufficient galaxies to provide the necessary ionizing flux. Fast accretion shocks associated with gravitational infall of baryons during the formation of galaxies have recently been proposed as an alternative method of generating the required ionizing photons. Here we assess the contribution to hydrogen reionization from shocked gas associated with gravitational infall. We find that shocks can ionize no more than a few percent of the cosmic hydrogen by z ∼ 6. However, the small fraction of ionizing radiation produced by fast accretion shocks would be significantly more biased than that associated with stars, leading to a modification of the luminosity weighted source clustering by ∼10%. This modification of the bias may be measurable with future precision experiments utilizing the redshifted 21cm line to study the distribution of hydrogen during the reionization era.