Integrated column densities vs shock age

The results are applicable to the shock-heated warm/hot intergalactic medium which is expected to be a major baryonic reservoir and contain a large fraction of the so-called missing baryons. My computations indicate that readily observable amounts of intermediate and high ions, such as CIV, NV, and OVI, are created in the precursors of young shocks, for which the shocked gas remains hot and difficult to observe.

I suggest that such precursors may provide a way to identify and estimate the "missing" baryonic mass associated with the shocks. The absorption-line signatures predicted here may be used to construct ion-ratio diagrams, which will serve as diagnostics for the photoionized gas in the precursors. In my numerical models, the time evolution of the shock structure, self-radiation, and associated metal-ion column densities are computed by a series of quasi-static models, each appropriate for a different shock age.