The impact of primordial supersonic flows on early structure formation,
  reionization and the lowest-mass dwarf galaxies
  Tseliakhovich & Hirata recently discovered that higher-order corrections to
the cosmological linear-perturbation theory lead to supersonic coherent
baryonic flows just after recombination (i.e. z~1020), with rms velocities of
~30 km/s relative to the underlying dark-matter distribution, on comoving
scales of ~<3 Mpc/h. To study the impact of these coherent flows we performed
high-resolution N-body plus SPH simulations in boxes of 5.0 and 0.7 Mpc/h, for
bulk-flow velocities of 0 (as reference), 30 and 60 km/s. The simulations
follow the evolution of cosmic structures by taking into account detailed,
primordial, non-equilibrium gas chemistry (i.e. H, He, H2, HD, HeH, etc.),
cooling, star formation, and feedback effects from stellar evolution. We find
that these bulk flows suppress star formation in low-mass haloes (i.e.
Mvir<~10^8Msun until z~13, lower the abundance of the first objects by ~1%-20%,
and, as consequence, delay cosmic star formation history by ~2e7yr. The gas
fractions in individual objects can change up to a factor of two at very early
times. Coherent bulk flow, therefore, has implications for (i) the
star-formation in the lowest-mass haloes (e.g. dSphs), (ii) the start of
reionization by suppressing it in some patches of the Universe, and (iii) the
heating (i.e. spin temperature) of neutral hydrogen. We speculate that the
patchy nature of reionization and heating on several Mpc scales could lead to
enhanced differences in the HI spin-temperature, giving rise to stronger
variations in the HI brightness temperatures during the late dark ages.
