Journal article
A study of fundamental limitations to statistical detection of redshifted H i from the epoch of reionization
N Thyagarajan, N Udaya Shankar, R Subrahmanyan, W Arcus, G Bernardi, JD Bowman, F Briggs, JD Bunton, RJ Cappallo, BE Corey, L Desouza, D Emrich, BM Gaensler, RF Goeke, LJ Greenhill, BJ Hazelton, D Herne, JN Hewitt, M Johnston-Hollitt, DL Kaplan Show all
Astrophysical Journal | IOP Publishing Ltd | Published : 2013
Abstract
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 ..
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Grants
Awarded by National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
This scientific work makes use of the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the Observatory site. Support for the MWA comes from the U.S. National Science Foundation (grants AST-0457585, PHY-0835713, CAREER-0847753, and AST-0908884), the Australian Research Council (LIEF grants LE0775621 and LE0882938), the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (grant FA9550-0510247), and the Centre for All-sky Astrophysics (an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence funded by grant CE110001020). Support is also provided by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the MIT School of Science, the Raman Research Institute, the Australian National University, and the Victoria University of Wellington (via grant MED-E1799 from the New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development and an IBM Shared University Research Grant). The Australian Federal government provides additional support via the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, Education Investment Fund, and the Australia India Strategic Research Fund, and Astronomy Australia Limited, under contract to Curtin University. We acknowledge the iVEC Petabyte Data Store, the Initiative in Innovative Computing and the CUDA Center for Excellence sponsored by NVIDIA at Harvard University, and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), a Joint Venture of Curtin University and the University of Western Australia, funded by the Western Australian State government. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.