Journal article
The impact of ionization morphology and X-ray heating on the cosmological 21-cm skew spectrum
JH Cook, S Balu, B Greig, CM Trott, JLB Line, Y Qin, JSB Wyithe
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | OXFORD UNIV PRESS | Published : 2024
Abstract
The cosmological 21-cm signal offers a potential probe of the early Universe and the first ionizing sources. Current experiments probe the spatially dependent variance (Gaussianity) of the signal through the power spectrum (PS). The signal, however, is expected to be highly non-Gaussian due to the complex topology of reionization and X-ray heating. We investigate the non-Gaussianities of X-ray heating and reionization, by calculating the skew spectrum (SS) of the 21-cm signal using MERAXES, which couples a semi-analytic galaxy population with seminumerical reionization simulations. The SS is the cross-spectrum of the quadratic temperature brightness field with itself. We generate a set of se..
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Grants
Awarded by Australian Government
Funding Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the helpful discussion of Simon Mutch who assisted with this work. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D) through project number CE170100013. JHC is supported by a Research Training Program scholarship. CMT is supported by an ARC Future Fellowship under grant FT180100321. The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) is a Joint Venture of Curtin University and The University of Western Australia, funded by the Western Australian State government. The MWA Phase II upgrade project was supported by the Australian Research Council LIEF grant LE160100031 and the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. This scientific work makes use of the Murchison 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. We acknowledge the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre which is supported by the Western Australian and Australian Governments.