X-ray absorption lines in the warm–hot intergalactic medium: probing Chandra observations with the CAMEL simulations

Known as the "Missing Baryon Problem", about one-third of baryons in the local universe remain unaccounted for. The missing baryons are thought to reside in the warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM) of the cosmic web filaments, which are challenging to detect. Recent Chandra X-ray observations used a novel stacking analysis and detected an OVII absorption line toward the sightline of a luminous quasar, hinting that the missing baryons may reside in the WHIM. To explore how the properties of the OVII absorption line depend on feedback physics, we compare the observational results with predictions obtained from the Cosmology and Astrophysics with MachinE Learning (CAMEL) Simulation suite. CAMELS consists of cosmological simulations with state-of-the-art supernova (SN) and active galactic nuclei (AGN) feedback models from the IllustrisTNG and SIMBA simulations, with varying strengths. We find that the simulated OVII column densities are higher in the outskirts of galaxies than in the large-scale WHIM, but they are consistently lower than those obtained in the Chandra observations, for all feedback runs. We establish that the OVII distribution is primarily sensitive to changes in the SN feedback prescription, whereas changes in the AGN feedback prescription have minimal impact. We also find significant differences in the OVII column densities between the IllustrisTNG and SIMBA runs. We conclude that the tension between the observed and simulated OVII column densities cannot be explained by the wide range of feedback models implemented in CAMELS.
Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures. Matching to the published version on MNRAS