Reionization Optical Depth

The Thomson scattering optical depth to reionization ($\tau$) constrains when the first stars and galaxies ionized the neutral universe. While early WMAP results suggested a high optical depth (early reionization at $z>15$), Planck 2018 lowered this to $\tau \approx 0.054$, implying a "late" reionization ending at $z \approx 7.7$. However, JWST has discovered a surprising abundance of bright, massive galaxies at $z>10$ which, if they had standard escape fractions of UV photons, should have reionized the universe much earlier ($\tau > 0.08$). Reconciling the "late" CMB reionization with the "early" JWST dawn requires fine-tuning the escape fractions or postulating that reionization was extremely inefficient despite abundant star formation (Planck Collaboration 2020; Naidu et al. 2020).

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