No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 August 2015
We wish to discuss two ways in which non-thermal background X-rays and ultraviolet radiation may interact with intergalactic matter: (i) low energy photons may be intense enough to photoionize the intergalactic medium and maintain it as an Hii region; (ii) the recoil associated with Compton scattering of hard X-rays provides an additional heat input into the medium, as well as causing a characteristic modification of the background radiation spectrum. We shall merely summarize our results here, as fuller details are appearing elsewhere (Rees and Setti, 1969).