Digging for the Truth: Photon Archeology with GLAST

Abstract

Stecker, Malkan and Scully, have shown how ongoing deep surveys of galaxy luminosity functions, spectral energy distributions and backwards evolution models of star formation rates can be used to calculate the past history of intergalactic photon densities for energies from 0.03 eV to the Lyman limit at 13.6 eV and for redshifts out to 6 (called here the intergalactic background light or IBL). From these calculations of the IBL at various redshifts, they predict the present and past optical depth of the universe to high energy gamma-rays owing to interactions with photons of the IBL and the 2.7 K CMB. We discuss here how this proceedure can be reversed by looking for sharp cutoffs in the spectra of extragalactic gamma-ray sources such as blazars at high redshifts in the multi-GeV energy range with GLAST. By determining the cutoff energies of sources with known redshifts, we can refine our determination of the IBL photon densities in the past, i.e., the "archeo-IBL", and therefore get a better measure of the past history of the total star formation rate. Conversely, observations of sharp high energy cutoffs in the gamma-ray spectra of sources at unknown redshifts can be used instead of spectral lines to give a measure of their redshifts.