James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post

Harvard ADS: Intergalactic Lyman-\alpha haloes before reionization are detectable with JWST

Paper abstract: The James \ Webb \ Space \ Telescope \ (JWST) recently reported a large population of UV luminous galaxies at high redshifts, z > 10, as well as Lyman-\alpha emitting (LAE) galaxies out to z ~ 11. We use the observed UV luminosities along with a data-driven approach at lower redshifts to place constraints on the observability of the intergalactic Lyman-\alpha intensity, scattered in the form of Loeb-Rybicki haloes, during the pre-reionization and reionization epochs (z ~ 9-16). We forecast the sensitivity and resolution required to detect these intergalactic haloes, finding that individual haloes with LAE luminosities > 10^{43} ergs/s are detectable at a few sigma level at z <~ 11, while stacking of ~ 10 haloes is expected to result in detections out to z ~ 16. Finding these haloes is expected to shed light on the neutral intergalactic hydrogen during cosmic reionization.