As recent cosmological simulations imply, the
temperature of the intergalactic medium (IGM)
undergoes a significant change from
high to low redshifts parallel to the proceeding of
large-scale structure formation in the Universe (e.g.,
Cen & Ostriker
1999;
Davé et
al. 2001).
As a result, a substantial fraction of the baryonic
matter in the local Universe is expected to reside in
the so-called Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM).
The WHIM represents a low-density (nH ~
10-6 - 10-4 cm-3),
high-temperature (T ~ 105 - 107 K) plasma
that primarily is made of
protons, electrons, He II, and He III, together with traces of some
highly-ionised heavy elements. The WHIM is believed to
emerge from intergalactic gas that is shock-heated to
high temperatures as the medium is collapsing under the
action of gravity in large-scale filaments (e.g.,
Valageas et
al. 2002).
In this scenario, part of the warm (photoionised) intergalactic medium that
gives rise to the Ly
forest in the spectra of distant
quasars (QSO) is falling in to the potential wells of the
increasingly pronounced filaments, gains energy
(through gravity), and is heated to high temperatures by shocks that
run through the plasma.
Because of the low density and the high degree of ionisation, direct
observations of the shock-heated and collisionally ionised
WHIM are challenging with current instrumentation
(in contrast to the photoionised IGM, which is easily observable
through the Ly forest).
Diffuse emission from the WHIM plasma must have a very low surface
brightness and its detection awaits UV and X-ray observatories more
sensitive than currently available (see, e.g.,
Fang et al. 2005;
Kawahara et
al. 2006).
The most promising approach to study the WHIM with observations at low
redshift is to search for absorption features from the WHIM in FUV and
in the X-ray regime in the spectra of quasars, active galactic nuclei
(AGN) and other suited extragalactic background sources.
As the WHIM represents a highly-ionised plasma, the
most important WHIM absorption lines are those originating from
the electronic transitions of high-ionisation state ions
(hereafter referred to as "high ions") of abundant heavy elements
such as oxygen and carbon. Among these, five-times ionised oxygen (O VI) is
the most valuable high ion to trace the WHIM at temperatures of
T ~ 3 × 105 K in the FUV regime. In the X-ray
band, the O VII and O VIII transitions represent the
key observables to trace the WHIM at higher temperatures in the
range 3 × 105 < T < 107.
In addition to the spectral signatures of high ions of heavy
elements the search for broad and shallow
Ly absorption from the
tiny fraction of neutral hydrogen in the WHIM represents another
possibility to identify and study the most massive WHIM filaments
in the intergalactic medium with FUV absorption spectroscopy.
Finally, for the interpretation of the observed WHIM absorption features
in UV and X-ray spectra the comparison between real data and
artificial spectra generated by numerical simulations that include
realistic gas physics is of great importance to identify
possible pitfalls related to technical and physical
issues such as limited signal-to-noise ratios and spectral resolution,
line-broadening mechanisms, non-equilibrium conditions, and others.
In this chapter, we review the physics and methodology of the UV and X-ray absorption measurements of warm-hot intergalactic gas at low redshift and summarise the results of recent observations obtained with space-based observatories. The outline of this chapter is the following. The ionisation conditions of the WHIM and the most important absorption signatures of this gas in the UV and X-ray band are presented in Sect. 2. Recent UV absorption measurements of the WHIM at low redshift are discussed in Sect. 3. Similarly, measurements of the WHIM in the X-ray are presented in Sect. 4. In Sect. 5 we compare the results from WHIM observations with predictions from numerical simulations and give an overview of WHIM measurements at high redshift. Finally, some concluding remarks are given in Sect. 5.