Abstract
When galaxies and stars began to form, they released ionizing radiation into the intergalactic medium which resulted in its reionization over the course of the first billion years. This ionizing radiation was dominated by massive stars. The same massive stars that released this ionizing radiation responsible for reionization also formed and released heavy elements when they exploded as supernovae, enriching the metal-free primordial gas both inside galaxies and outside them, by driving winds into the surrounding IGM. Just as reionization was inhomogeneous, so must the rise of metallicity during the EoR have been. The theory of this inhomogeneous rise of metallicity is, therefore, inseparable from the theory of reionization, and predicting its observable consequences requires us to model both processes, together, self-consistently. We have analyzed the results of the latest state-of-the-art radiation-hydro simulation of fully-coupled galaxy formation and reionization by The Cosmic Dawn (“CoDa”) Project, CoDa III, including its self-consistent tracking of the inhomogeneous rise of metallicity through the end of the EoR and beyond. We will present these CoDa III results for the inhomogeneous evolution of metallicity in the universe and its observable consequences.
