Is There Still Room for Warm/Hot Gas? Simulating the X-ray Background Spectrum

Abstract

At low redshifts, a census of the baryons in all known reservoirs falls a factor of two to four below the total baryon density predicted from Big Bang nucleosynthesis arguments and observed light element ratios. Recent cosmological hydrodynamic simulations suggest that a significant fraction of these missing baryons could be in the form of warm/hot gas in the filaments and halos within which most field galaxies are embedded. With the release of source count results from Chandra and recent detections of this gas in O VI quasar absorption lines, it becomes interesting to examine the predictions and limits placed on this component of the X-ray background (XRB). We have used new hydrodynamical simulations to predict the total X-ray spectrum from the gas in the 100 eV to 10 keV range. We find that, when uncertainties in the normalization of the observed XRB and the value of Omega_b are taken into account, our results are consistent with current observational limits placed on the contribution of emission from gas to the XRB. In the 0.5-2 keV range, we expect the contribution from this component to be 0.63 10^{-12} erg s^-1 cm^-2 deg^-2 or between 6% and 18% of the extragalactic surface brightness. The peak fraction occurs in the 0.5-1 keV range where the predicted line emission mirrors a spectral bump seen in the latest ASCA/ROSAT XRB data.