Abstract
The mechanisms of absorption formation in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) spectrum at the frequency of the 21-cm line of the transition between the ground-state hyperfine sublevels of the hydrogen atom are analyzed. We show that a strong nonlinearity at the compression stage of primordial matter density fluctuations can give rise to a significant (in depth) absorption even before the explosions of the first stars. In this case, the main effect is due to the heating of matter in a certain narrow range of temperatures under cloud compression. We consider a steady-state radiative transfer in the 21-cm line in a medium that represents a contracting primordial matter density fluctuation at a given redshift z modeled by a homogeneous spherically symmetric cloud in the state of collapse with an adiabatic change in the gas temperature. For a sequence of cloud states with different degrees of compression we have calculated the frequency profiles of the line in the flux of radiation emerging from the cloud. In the initial state we specify the cloud radius r0, while the gas density is assumed to be equal to the mean cosmological density for a given redshift. We show that for a separate cloud at z = 20, r0 = 1 kpc, and a degree of radius compression of 1.9 the absorption depth in the line center can reach 0.9 K. When averaged over an ensemble of clouds, the central frequency of the line and its width are determined by the details of the fluctuation evolution dynamics.
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Funding
This work was performed under the State contract of the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences approved by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation.
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Russian Text © The Author(s), 2019, published in Pis'ma v Astronomicheskii Zhurnal, 2019, Vol. 45, No. 11, pp. 759-767.
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Dubrovich, V.K., Grachev, S.I. Absorption in the 21-cm Line in Primordial Matter Density Fluctuations at the Stage of Their Nonlinear Compression. Astron. Lett. 45, 701–709 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1063773719110021
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1063773719110021