Probing individual sources during reionization and cosmic dawn using SKA HI 21-cm observations

Abstract

Detection of individual luminous sources during the reionization epoch and cosmic dawn through their signatures in the HI 21-cm signal is one of the direct approaches to probe the epoch. Here, we summarize our previous works on this and present preliminary results on the prospects of detecting such sources using the SKA1-low experiment. We first discuss the expected HI 21-cm signal around luminous sources at different stages of reionization and cosmic dawn. We then introduce two visibility based estimators for detecting such signal: one based on the matched filtering technique and the other relies on simply combing the visibility signal from different baselines and frequency channels. We find that that the SKA1-low should be able to detect ionized bubbles of radius $R_b\gtrsim 10$ Mpc with $\sim 100$ hr of observations at redshift $z\sim 8$ provided that the mean outside neutral Hydrogen fraction $x_{\mathrm{HI}}\gtrsim 0.5$. We also investigate the possibility of detecting HII regions around known bright QSOs such as around ULASJ1120+0641 discovered by Mortlock et al. 2011. We find that a $5\sigma$ detection is possible with $600$ hr of SKA1-low observations if the QSO age and the outside $x_{\mathrm{HI}}$ are at least $\sim 2\times 10^7$ Myr and $\sim 0.2$ respectively. Finally, we investigate the possibility of detecting the very first X-ray and Ly-$\alpha$ sources during the cosmic dawn. We consider mini-QSOs like sources which emits in X-ray frequency band. We find that with a total $\sim 1000$ hr of observations, SKA1-low should be able to detect those sources individually with a $\sim 9\sigma$ significance at redshift $z=15$. We summarize how the SNR changes with various parameters related to the source properties.

arXiv commentTo appear in Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy (JOAA) special issue on "Science with the SKA: an Indian perspective"

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