Source Mergers and Bubble Growth During Reionization

Abstract

The recently introduced models of reionization bubbles based on extended Press-Schechter theory (Furlanetto, Zaldarriaga & Hernquist 2004) are generalized to include mergers of ionization sources. Sources with a recent major merger are taken to have enhanced photon production due to star formation, and accretion onto a central black hole if a black hole is present. This produces a scatter in the number of ionized photons corresponding to a halo of a given mass and a change in photon production over time for any given halo mass. Photon production histories, bubble distributions, and ionization histories are computed for several different parameter and recombination assumptions; the resulting distributions interpolate between previously calculated limiting cases.