COSMICDAWN21CM
Probing the cosmic dawn and the epoch of reionization with the history and fluctuations of the hydrogen 21-cm line
| Coordinatore | UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
Organization address
address: GOWER STREET contact info |
| Nazionalità Coordinatore | United Kingdom [UK] |
| Totale costo | 299˙558 € |
| EC contributo | 299˙558 € |
| Programma | FP7-PEOPLE
Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013) |
| Code Call | FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF |
| Funding Scheme | MC-IEF |
| Anno di inizio | 2014 |
| Periodo (anno-mese-giorno) | 2014-03-01 - 2016-02-29 |
Partecipanti
| # | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
Organization address
address: GOWER STREET contact info |
UK (LONDON) | coordinator | 299˙558.40 |
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Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)
'One of the frontiers being explored by astronomy today is the period between approximately 400000 years after the Big Bang, from which time we can detect the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and around one billion years after the Big Bang, when early galaxies and quasars start to become visible to current instruments, such as ALMA and the Wide Field Camera 3 on HST. The most promising observational probe of this period is the redshifted 21-cm hyperfine line of atomic hydrogen.
The LOFAR telescope is now operational, and from its site in the Netherlands will be able to detect 21-cm radiation from the latter part of this period, the 'epoch of reionization' (EoR). Foreground radiation at the same frequency is several orders of magnitude more intense than the cosmological signal, however. Moreover, the data will have low signal-to-noise and be filtered through a complex instrument. As one of the core members of the LOFAR EoR key project, I have developed techniques to extract information about cosmology and reionization from the data, and applied them to synthetic EoR observations. During the fellowship, I will continue to develop and extend these methods with the help of the expertise in data analysis and novel statistical methods at UCL, begin to apply them to the real data which will start to arrive during the period of the fellowship, and use them to learn about the EoR.
Other experiments are being proposed which would be able to probe earlier parts of this period, the 'dark ages' and the 'cosmic dawn'. I am a co-investigator on a satellite mission, the Dark Ages Radio Explorer (DARE), which will be proposed to NASA's 2013 Explorer program. It would take a complementary approach to LOFAR's, observing the sky-averaged 21-cm signal (rather than its fluctuations) at even lower radio frequencies, with the aim of learning about the very first stars and black holes. Analysing its data presents a different challenge, and will also require novel techniques.'