Sunyaev-Zel'dovich distortion from early galactic winds

Abstract

We consider the distortion in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) due to galactic winds at high redshift. Winds outflowing from galaxies have been hypothesized to be possible sources of metals in the intergalactic medium, which is known to have been enriched to $10^{-2.5}$ Z$_{\odot}$ at $z \sim 3$. We model these winds as functions of mass of the parent galaxy and redshift, assuming they activate at a common initial redshift, $z_{in}$, and calculate the mean $y$ distortion and the angular power spectrum of the distortion in the CMB. We find that the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect due to the winds to be consistent with previous estimates. The distortion due to the kinetic SZ (kSZ) effect is, however, found to be more important than the thermal SZ (tSZ) effect. We find that the distortion due to galactic winds is an important contribution to the power spectrum of distortion at very small angular scales $(l \sim 10^4)$. We also find that the power spectrum due to clustering dominates the Poisson power spectrum for $l \le 4\hbox{--}5 \times 10^5$. We show explicitly how the combined power spectrum from wind dominates over that of clusters at 217 GHz, relevant for PLANCK. We also show how these constraints change when the efficiency of the winds is varied.