Journal article
Quantifying excess power from radio frequency interference in Epoch of Reionization measurements
Michael J Wilensky, Nichole Barry, Miguel F Morales, Bryna J Hazelton, Ruby Byrne
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY | OXFORD UNIV PRESS | Published : 2020
Abstract
We quantify the effect of radio frequency interference (RFI) on measurements of the 21-cm power spectrum during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). Specifically, we investigate how the frequency structure of RFI source emission generates contamination in higher order wave modes, which is much more problematic than smooth-spectrum foreground sources. Using a relatively optimistic EoR model, we find that even a single relatively dim RFI source can overwhelm the EoR power spectrum signal of ∼10mK2 for modes 0.1
Grants
Awarded by NSF
Awarded by Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D)
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous referee for providing very helpful comments during review. We also thank the development teams of PYUVDATA, NUMPY, SCIPY, MATPLOTLIB, FHD, and ePPSILON, which enabled this work. This work was directly supported by NSF grants AST-1643011, AST-1613855, OAC-1835421, and AST-1506024. NB is supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), through project number CE170100013. This scientific work makes use of theMurchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, operated by CSIRO. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the Observatory site. Support for the operation of the MWA is provided by the Australian Government (NCRIS), under a contract to Curtin University administered by Astronomy Australia Limited.