Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 429

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 50 of the 50 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Evidence of patchy hydrogen reionization from an extreme Lyα trough below redshift six

Open access
Becker, George D., Bolton, James S., Madau, Piero, Pettini, Max, Ryan-Weber, Emma V., Venemans, Bram P.·2015·Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
DOI 10.1093/mnras/stu2646
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

We report the discovery of an extremely long (∼110 Mpc h−1) and dark (τeff ≳ 7) Lyα trough extending down to z ≃ 5.5 towards the zem ≃ 6.0 quasar ULAS J0148+0600. We use these new data in combination with Lyα forest measurements from 42 quasars at 4.5 ≤ zem ≤ 6.4 to conduct an updated analysis of the line-of-sight variance in the intergalactic Lyα opacity over 4 ≤ z ≤ 6. We find that the scatter in transmission among lines of sight near z ∼ 6 significantly exceeds theoretical expectations for either a uniform ultraviolet background (UVB) or simple fluctuating UVB models in which the mean free path to ionizing photons is spatially invariant. The data, particularly near z ≃ 5.6–5.8, instead require fluctuations in the volume-weighted hydrogen neutral fraction that are a factor of 3 or more beyond those expected from density variations alone. We argue that these fluctuations are most likely driven by large-scale variations in the mean free path, consistent with expectations for the final stages of inhomogeneous hydrogen reionization. Even by z ≃ 5.6, however, a large fraction of the data are consistent with a uniform UVB, and by z ∼ 5 the data are fully consistent with opacity fluctuations arising solely from the density field. This suggests that while reionization may be ongoing at z ∼ 6, it has fully completed by z ∼ 5.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1093/mnras/stu2646

Cites

50 of 50 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 50 references

Cited by

See all 429

Metadata

Authors
Becker, G. D., Bolton, J. S., Madau, P., Pettini, M., Ryan-Weber, E. V., & Venemans, B. P.
Venue
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Published
2015-01-22
Volume
447
Issue
4
Pages
3402-3419
ISSN
  • 0035-8711 (ISSN-L)
  • 1365-2966
DOI
10.1093/mnras/stu2646
OpenAlex
W2325917856
Cited by
429
References
50
FWCI
26.82
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Evidence of patchy hydrogen reionization from an extreme Lyα trough below redshift six. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/mnras/stu2646
The paper
Becker, G. D., Bolton, J. S., Madau, P., Pettini, M., Ryan-Weber, E. V., & Venemans, B. P. (2015). Evidence of patchy hydrogen reionization from an extreme Lyα trough below redshift six. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stu2646

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.