Bayesian constraints on the global 21-cm signal from the Cosmic Dawn
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2016•academic.oup.com
The birth of the first luminous sources and the ensuing epoch of reionization are best studied
via the redshifted 21-cm emission line, the signature of the first two imprinting the last. In this
work, we present a fully Bayesian method, hibayes, for extracting the faint, global (sky-
averaged) 21-cm signal from the much brighter foreground emission. We show that a
simplified (but plausible) Gaussian model of the 21-cm emission from the Cosmic Dawn
epoch (15≲ z≲ 30), parametrized by an amplitude, a frequency peak and a width, can be …
via the redshifted 21-cm emission line, the signature of the first two imprinting the last. In this
work, we present a fully Bayesian method, hibayes, for extracting the faint, global (sky-
averaged) 21-cm signal from the much brighter foreground emission. We show that a
simplified (but plausible) Gaussian model of the 21-cm emission from the Cosmic Dawn
epoch (15≲ z≲ 30), parametrized by an amplitude, a frequency peak and a width, can be …
Abstract
The birth of the first luminous sources and the ensuing epoch of reionization are best studied via the redshifted 21-cm emission line, the signature of the first two imprinting the last. In this work, we present a fully Bayesian method, hibayes, for extracting the faint, global (sky-averaged) 21-cm signal from the much brighter foreground emission. We show that a simplified (but plausible) Gaussian model of the 21-cm emission from the Cosmic Dawn epoch (15 ≲ z ≲ 30), parametrized by an amplitude $A_{\rm H\,\small {I}}$, a frequency peak $\nu _{\rm H\,\small {I}}$ and a width $\sigma _{\rm H\,\small {I}}$, can be extracted even in the presence of a structured foreground frequency spectrum (parametrized as a seventh-order polynomial), provided sufficient signal-to-noise (400 h of observation with a single dipole). We apply our method to an early, 19-min-long observation from the Large aperture Experiment to detect the Dark Ages, constraining the 21-cm signal amplitude and width to be $-890 \lt A_{\rm H\,\small {I}} \lt 0$ mK and $\sigma _{\rm H\,\small {I}} \gt 6.5$ MHz (corresponding to Δz > 1.9 at redshift z ≃ 20) respectively at the 95-per cent confidence level in the range 13.2 < z < 27.4 (100 > ν > 50 MHz).
Oxford University Press