Will point sources spoil 21 cm tomography?
arXiv:0807.3952 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.14426.x
Abstract
21 cm tomography is emerging as a promising probe of the cosmological dark ages and the epoch of reionization, as well as a tool for observational cosmology in general. However, serious sources of foreground contamination must be subtracted for experimental efforts to be viable. In this paper, we focus on the removal of unresolved extragalactic point sources with smooth spectra, and evaluate how the residual foreground contamination after cleaning depends on instrumental and algorithmic parameters. A crucial but often ignored complication is that the synthesized beam of an interferometer array shrinks towards higher frequency, causing complicated frequency structure in each sky pixel as "frizz" far from the beam center contracts across unresolved radio sources. We find that current-generation experiments should nonetheless be able to clean out this points source contamination adequately, and quantify the instrumental and algorithmic design specifications required to meet this foreground challenge.
14 pages, 17 figures, replaced to match accepted MNRAS version
References in corpus (24)
- Three-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Temperature Analysis
- 21-cm Tomography of the Intergalactic Medium at High Redshift
- A model of diffuse Galactic Radio Emission from 10 MHz to 100 GHz
- Cosmological Parameter Estimation Using 21 cm Radiation from the Epoch of Reionization
- The morphology of HII regions during reionization
- Measuring the Small-Scale Power Spectrum of Cosmic Density Fluctuations Through 21 cm Tomography Prior to the Epoch of Structure Formation
- Foregrounds and Forecasts for the Cosmic Microwave Background
- Multifrequency analysis of 21 cm fluctuations from the Era of Reionization
- How accurately can 21 cm tomography constrain cosmology?
- Detecting the Earliest Galaxies Through Two New Sources of 21cm Fluctuations
- Foreground simulations for the LOFAR - Epoch of Reionization Experiment
- Studying Reionization with Ly-alpha Emitters
- Radio Signatures of HI at High Redshift: Mapping the End of the ``Dark Ages''
- Fossil HII Regions: Self-Limiting Star Formation at High Redshift
- Radio Foregrounds for the 21cm Tomography of the Neutral Intergalactic Medium at High Redshifts
- Statistical Probes of Reionization With 21 cm Tomography
- Detecting the Rise and Fall of 21 cm Fluctuations with the Murchison Widefield Array
- Twenty-one centimeter tomography with foregrounds
- On the Direct Detectability of the Cosmic Dark Ages: 21-cm Emission from Minihalos
- Foregrounds for 21cm Observations of Neutral Gas at High Redshift
- Improving Foreground Subtraction in Statistical Observations of 21 cm Emission from the Epoch of Reionization
- Observing the Reionization Epoch Through 21 Centimeter Radiation
- Constraints on Fundamental Cosmological Parameters with Upcoming Redshifted 21 cm Observations
- Cosmological and Astrophysical Parameter Measurements with 21-cm Anisotropies During the Era of Reionization
Cited by in corpus (76)
- Reionization and Cosmology with 21 cm Fluctuations
- Bright Source Subtraction Requirements For Redshifted 21 cm Measurements
- Science with the Murchison Widefield Array
- The Epoch of Reionization Window: I. Mathematical Formalism
- PAPER-64 Constraints on Reionization: The 21cm Power Spectrum at z=8.4
- Data Analysis for Precision 21 cm Cosmology
- The Epoch of Reionization Window: II. Statistical Methods for Foreground Wedge Reduction
- Overcoming real-world obstacles in 21 cm power spectrum estimation: A method demonstration and results from early Murchison Widefield Array data
- All-Sky Interferometry with Spherical Harmonic Transit Telescopes
- The GMRT-EoR Experiment: A new upper limit on the neutral hydrogen power spectrum at z~8.6
- Foregrounds for observations of the cosmological 21 cm line: I. First Westerbork measurements of Galactic emission at 150 MHz in a low latitude field
- A Method for 21cm Power Spectrum Estimation in the Presence of Foregrounds
- Foreground Removal using FastICA: A Showcase of LOFAR-EoR
- Coaxing Cosmic 21cm Fluctuations from the Polarized Sky using m-mode Analysis
- The Scale of the Problem : Recovering Images of Reionization with GMCA
- Precision Calibration of Radio Interferometers Using Redundant Baselines
- An Improved Method for 21cm Foreground Removal
- Foregrounds for observations of the cosmological 21 cm line: II. Westerbork observations of the fields around 3C196 and the North Celestial Pole
- Characterizing Foreground for redshifted 21-cm radiation: 150 MHz GMRT observations
- Non-parametric foreground subtraction for 21cm epoch of reionization experiments
- How well can we measure and understand foregrounds with 21 cm experiments?
- Extending cosmological tests of General Relativity with the Square Kilometre Array
- Probing reionization with LOFAR using 21-cm redshift space distortions
- The Effects of Polarized Foregrounds on 21cm Epoch of Reionization Power Spectrum Measurements
- Systematic Effects of Foreground Removal in 21cm Surveys of Reionization
- Parametrising Epoch of Reionization foregrounds: A deep survey of low-frequency point-source spectra with the MWA
- Global 21cm signal experiments: A designer's guide
- Improved foreground removal in GMRT 610 MHz observations towards redshifted 21-cm tomography
- Simulations for single-dish intensity mapping experiments
- A Fast Method for Power Spectrum and Foreground Analysis for 21 cm Cosmology
- The Murchison Widefield Array 21 cm Power Spectrum Analysis Methodology
- Extracting HI cosmological signal with Generalized Needlet Internal Linear Combination
- The impact of interference excision on 21-cm Epoch of Reionization power spectrum analyses
- Spherical Harmonic Analyses of Intensity Mapping Power Spectra
- GMRT observation towards detecting the Post-reionization 21-cm signal
- Mapmaking for Precision 21 cm Cosmology
- Separating the EoR Signal with a Convolutional Denoising Autoencoder: A Deep-learning-based Method
- Polarised foreground removal at low radio frequencies using rotation measure synthesis: uncovering the signature of hydrogen reionisation
- Subtraction of point sources from interferometric radio images through an algebraic forward modeling scheme
- Bayesian semi-blind component separation for foreground removal in interferometric 21-cm observations
- Detection of Signals from Cosmic Reionization using Radio Interferometric Signal Processing
- Clustered Calibration: An Improvement to Radio Interferometric Direction Dependent Self-Calibration
- Demonstrating the Tapered Gridded Estimator (TGE) for the Cosmological HI 21-cm Power Spectrum using GMRT observations
- Subtraction of Bright Point Sources from Synthesis Images of the Epoch of Reionization
- A Flux Scale for Southern Hemisphere 21cm EoR Experiments
- Exploring the Cosmic Reionization Epoch in Frequency Space: An Improved Approach to Remove the Foreground in 21 cm Tomography
- A Halo Model Approach to the and Cross-correlation
- Deep learning approach for identification of HII regions during reionization in 21-cm observations -- II. foreground contamination
- An Improved Statistical Point-Source Foreground Model for the Epoch of Reionization
- A Bayesian analysis of redshifted 21-cm HI signal and foregrounds: Simulations for LOFAR
- Extracting the 21-cm Power Spectrum and the reionization parameters from mock datasets using Artificial Neural Networks
- Cross-correlation of the HI 21-cm Signal and Lyman-alpha Forest: A Probe Of Cosmology
- Angular clustering of point sources at 150 MHz in the TGSS survey
- Characterizing EoR foregrounds: A study of the Lockman Hole Region at 325 MHz
- 21cm Signal Recovery via the Robust Principle Component Analysis
- Probing reionization with the cross power spectrum of 21 cm and near-infrared radiation backgrounds
- A General Bayesian Framework to Account for Foreground Map Errors in Global 21-cm Experiments
- A Semi-blind PCA-based Foreground Subtraction Method for 21 cm Intensity Mapping
- Measuring the Redshift of Reionization with a Modest Array of Low-Frequency Dipoles
- Subtracting Foregrounds from Interferometric Measurements of the Redshifted 21 cm Emission
- Simulated foreground predictions for HI at z = 3.35 with the Ooty Wide Field Array: I. Instrument and the foregrounds
- Detecting primordial gravitational waves with circular polarization of the redshifted 21 cm line: I. Formalism
- Contribution of Radio Halos to the Foreground for SKA EoR Experiments
- The precision and accuracy of early Epoch of Reionization foreground models: comparing MWA and PAPER 32-antenna source catalogs
- The LOFAR EoR Data Model: (I) Effects of Noise and Instrumental Corruptions on the 21-cm Reionization Signal-Extraction Strategy
- Detecting primordial gravitational waves with circular polarization of the redshifted 21 cm line: II. Forecasts
- Impact of extragalactic point sources on the low-frequency sky spectrum and cosmic dawn global 21-cm measurements
- Validating a novel angular power spectrum estimator using simulated low frequency radio-interferometric data
- Contribution of Galactic free-free emission to the foreground for EoR signal in SKA experiments
- Clustering at 74 MHz
- Measuring the reionization 21 cm fluctuations using clustering wedges
- Towards Optimal Foreground Mitigation Strategies for Interferometric HI Intensity Mapping in the Low-Redshift Universe
- Reconstructing the Long-wavelength Matter Density Fluctuation Modes from the Scalar-Type Clustering Fossils
- Clustered Radio Interferometric Calibration
- Simulated differential observations of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect: Probing the Dark Ages and Epoch of Reionization
- It's Always Darkest Before the Cosmic Dawn: Early Results from Novel Tools and Telescopes for 21 cm Cosmology