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College of Arts & Sciences
Ethan W. Konyk
College of Arts & Sciences
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Physics
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Michael S. Vogeley
Physics
Spatial Distribution of Gas Clouds in Voids
Most of the gas in the universe is spread throughout the intergalactic medium, the space between galaxies. Recent work (Pan et al. 2012; Watson et al., in preparation) shows that low density stretches of space, called voids, contain gas clouds that are significantly cooler than gas in dense groups and clusters of galaxies. The distribution of the clouds in space allows us to infer physical information about the intergalactic medium. We use galaxy observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 12 focused on the Northern Galactic Cap to map out large-scale structure in the nearby universe. We use a catalog of voids constructed using the ZOBOV algorithm which divides space into dense or void regions. Hubble Space Telescope Cosmic Origins Spectrograph observations of distant quasars (accreting supermassive black holes) reveal the locations of Lyman-alpha clouds, or cold hydrogen clouds, with respect to the voids. We can now quantify the spatial distribution of the observed Lyman-alpha clouds, which provide a strong test of our understanding of structure formation in the universe.
