Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• THYAGARAJAN, NITHYANANDAN
• Shankar, N Udaya
• Subrahmanyan, Ravi
• Arcus, Wayne
• Bernardi, Gianni
• Bowman, Judd D
• Briggs, Frank
• Bunton, John D
• CAPPALLO, ROGER J
• Corey, Brian E

Titel

A STUDY OF FUNDAMENTAL LIMITATIONS TO STATISTICAL DETECTION OF REDSHIFTED H I FROM THE EPOCH OF REIONIZATION

Ist Teil von

• The Astrophysical journal, 2013-10, Vol.776 (1), p.1-17

Ort / Verlag

United States

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In this paper, we explore for the first time the relative magnitudes of three fundamental sources of uncertainty, namely, foreground contamination, thermal noise, and sample variance, in detecting the H I power spectrum from the epoch of reionization (EoR). We derive limits on the sensitivity of a Fourier synthesis telescope to detect EoR based on its array configuration and a statistical representation of images made by the instrument. We use the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) configuration for our studies. Using a unified framework for estimating signal and noise components in the H I power spectrum, we derive an expression for and estimate the contamination from extragalactic point-like sources in three-dimensional k-space. Sensitivity for EoR H I power spectrum detection is estimated for different observing modes with MWA. With 1000 hr of observing on a single field using the 128 tile MWA, EoR detection is feasible (S/N >1 for k [<, ~]0.8 Mpc super(-1)). Bandpass shaping and refinements to the EoR window are found to be effective in containing foreground contamination, which makes the instrument tolerant to imaging errors. We find that for a given observing time, observing many independent fields of view does not offer an advantage over a single field observation when thermal noise dominates over other uncertainties in the derived power spectrum.