A hot intergalactic medium?

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Abstract
We have reinvestigated the possibility that a hot intergalactic medium produces the 5–200 keV X-ray background, including relativistic corrections for the gas emissivity and thermodynamics and Compton scattering on the microwave background. We show that thermal bremsstrahlung provides an accurate fit to the observed X-ray spectrum, provided the gas was heated at a redshift μm. Despite being the only physical model that adequately explains the spectrum of the X-ray background, the enormous total energy required is a severe problem. The gas density that we estimate is reduced by a factor of 2 below that obtained by previous workers and, if uniform, is too large to be consistent with current estimates of the cosmic abundance of deuterium. Small-scale clumping of the gas can overcome this discrepancy if there is pressure confinement by a yet hotter, lower density medium.

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