The Lyman-α (Lyα) forest allows to constraint cosmological parameters at redshifts above 1.8 $$ using the technique of standard rulers determined by baryon acoustic oscillations. This makes it an important tracer for study universe high redshift. For this work, several synthetic datasets have been generated understand astrophysical effects and contaminants that contribute shape Lyα flux correla...

We review the arguments given in [1] for how the slope of the column density distribution of the Lyα forest should depend on the matter power spectrum. The latest progress, presented by various groups in this conference and elsewhere, is summarized.

We examine the distribution of neutral hydrogen in cosmological simulations carried out with the new moving-mesh code AREPO and compare it with the corresponding GADGET simulations based on the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) technique. The two codes use identical gravity solvers and baryonic physics implementations, but very different methods for solving the Euler equations, allowing us ...

If the universe was reionized by O and B stars in an early population of galaxies, the associated supernovae should have enriched the universe to a mean metallicity Z̄ = 10(1 + nrec), where nrec is the mean number of times that each baryon recombined during the reionization era. This is consistent with recent observations of the metallicity in the Lyα forest at z ≃ 3. The mean surface brightness...

Observations of redshifted Lyman α (Lyα) forest absorption in the spectra of quasistellar objects (QSOs) provide a highly sensitive probe of the distribution of gaseous matter in the universe. Over the past two decades, optical spectroscopy with large ground-based telescopes, and more recently ultraviolet (UV) spectroscopy from space, have yielded a wealth of information on what appears to be a...

Since gamma-ray burst afterglows were first detected in 1997, the relativistic fireball model has emerged as the leading theoretical explanation of the afterglows. In this paper, we present a very general, Bayesian inference formalism with which this, or any other, afterglow model can be tested, and with which the parameter values of acceptable models can be constrained, given the available pho...

The analysis of the Lyman-alpha (Lyα) forest of absorption lines in quasar spectra has emerged as a potentially powerful technique to constrain the linear matter power spectrum. In most previous work, the amplitude of the ionizing background was fixed by calibrating simulations to match the observed mean transmitted flux in the Lyα forest. This procedure is undesirable in principle as it requir...