ADDING CONTEXT TOJAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPESURVEYS WITH CURRENT AND FUTURE 21 cm RADIO OBSERVATIONS

Abstract

Infrared and radio observations of the Epoch of Reionization promise to revolutionize our understanding of the cosmic dawn, and major efforts with the JWST, MWA and HERA are underway. While measurements of the ionizing sources with infrared telescopes and the effect of these sources on the intergalactic medium with radio telescopes should be complementary, to date the wildly disparate angular resolutions and survey speeds have made connecting proposed observations difficult. In this paper we develop a method to bridge the gap between radio and infrared studies. While the radio images may not have the sensitivity and resolution to identify individual bubbles with high fidelity, by leveraging knowledge of the measured power spectrum we are able to separate regions that are likely ionized from largely neutral, providing context for the JWST observations of galaxy counts and properties in each. By providing the ionization context for infrared galaxy observations, this method can significantly enhance the science returns of JWST and other infrared observations.

First Season Mwa Eor Power Spectrum Results at Redshift 7

“…Imaging involves many difficulties (e.g., efficient gridding and mapmaking, foreground modeling), but if systematics can be overcome, it has the potential to compete with other more targeted experiments and analysis styles. More broadly, imaging analyses will be necessary to perform cross-correlation studies with complimentary probes such as galaxy surveys or other intensity mapping experiments (e.g., Lidz et al 2009;Doré et al 2014;Beardsley et al 2015;Silva et al 2015;DeBoer et al 2016;Vrbanec et al 2016), which will ultimately unlock the full potential of 21 cm observations. Here, we have identified a crucial region of power spectrum space that is currently contaminated, with suggestions for improvement in future analysis.…”

“…Complementary to powerspectrum experiments are efforts to detect the sky-average global 21 cm signal from the EoR (e.g., Bowman & Rogers 2010;Patra et al 2013;Voytek et al 2014;Sokolowski et al 2015). Meanwhile, the second generation of 21 cm EoR interferometers is on its way with the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array 31 , and the low frequency Square Kilometer Array (SKA1- Low Mellema et al 2013), which will further refine the power spectrum measurement in early build-out stages, but will ultimately be capable of imaging the ionized bubbles of reionization in its later stages (Malloy & Lidz 2013;Beardsley et al 2015).…”

21CMMC: an MCMC analysis tool enabling astrophysical parameter studies of the cosmic 21 cm signal

“…In the near future, second-generation experiments, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA; Mellema et al 2013) 4 and the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA; Beardsley et al 2015) 5 will feature significant increases in collecting area and overall sensitivity. In addition to statistical measurements of the 21 cm PS, these second-generation experiments should provide the first tomographic maps of the 21 cm signal from the EoR (Mellema et al 2013), deepening our understanding of reionization-era physics.…”

Contamination of the Epoch of Reionization power spectrum in the presence of foregrounds

“…HERA is a drift scanning interferometer currently under construction in the low RFI environment of the SKA-South Africa site in the Karoo desert (see e.g. Beardsley et al 2015 for additional details). Here we consider estimation of the power spectrum using data from the simulated observation, with HERA, of the field defined by our Galactic region A (see Figure 2).…”