Observing the reionization: effect of calibration and position errors on realistic observation conditions

Abstract

Observation of the redshifted 21-cm signal from Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionization is a challenging endeavor in observational cosmology. Presence of orders of magnitude brighter astrophysical foregrounds and various instrumental systematics increases the complexity of these observations. This work presents an end-to-end pipeline dealing with synthetic interferometric data of sensitive radio observations. The mock sky model includes the redshifted 21-cm signal and astrophysical foregrounds. The effects of calibration error and position error in the extraction of the redshifted 21-cm power spectrum has been simulated. The effect of the errors in the image plane detection of the cosmological signal has also been studied. A comparative analysis for array configurations like the SKA1-Low, MWA, and HERA has been demonstrated. The calibration error tolerance of the arrays, under some assumptions about the nature of the systematic components, is optimally found to be $\sim 0.01{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ for the detection of the signal. For position errors, an offset of 5 arcsec makes the residual foregrounds obscure the target signal. These simulations also imply that the SKA-1 Low performs marginally better than the other telescopes in the image domain. The same is true for MWA in the power spectrum domain. This is one of the first studies that compares performance of various radio telescopes operating under similar observing conditions towards detecting the cosmological signal. This end-to-end pipeline can also be extended to study effects of chromatic primary beam, radio frequency inferences, foregrounds with spectral features, etc. © 2022 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society.