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BINGO is a unique radio telescope designed to make the first detection of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) at radio frequencies. This will be achieved by measuring the distribution of neutral hydrogen gas at cosmological distances using a technique called Intensity Mapping. Along with the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies, the scale of BAO is one of the most powerful probes of cosmological parameters, including dark energy. The telescope will be built in a very low RFI site in South America and will operate in the frequency range from 0.96 GHz to 1.26 GHz. The telescope design consists of two $thicksim$ 40-m compact mirrors with no moving parts. Such a design will give the excellent polarization performance and very low sidelobe levels required for intensity mapping. With a feedhorn array of 50 receivers, it will map a $15^{circ}$ declination strip as the sky drifts past the field-of-view of the telescope. The BINGO consortium is composed Universidade de S~ao Paulo, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (Brazil), University of Manchester and University College London (United Kingdom), ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and Universidad de La Republica (Uruguay). The telescope assembly and horn design and fabrication are under way in Brazil. The receiver was designed in UK and will be developed in Brazil, with most of the components for the receiver will also be supplied by Brazilian industry. The experience and science goals achieved by the BINGO team will be advantageous as a pathfinder mission for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. This paper reports the current status of the BINGO mission, as well as preliminary results already obtained for the instrumentation development.
Calibration precision is currently a limiting systematic in 21 cm cosmology experiments. While there are innumerable calibration approaches, most can be categorized as either `sky-based, relying on an extremely accurate model of astronomical foreground emission, or `redundant, requiring a precisely regular array with near-identical antenna response patterns. Both of these classes of calibration are inflexible to the realities of interferometric measurement. In practice, errors in the foreground model, antenna position offsets, and beam response inhomogeneities degrade calibration performance and contaminate the cosmological signal. Here we show that sky-based and redundant calibration can be unified into a highly general and physically motivated calibration framework based on a Bayesian statistical formalism. Our new framework includes sky and redundant calibration as special cases but can additionally support relaxing the rigid assumptions implicit in those approaches. Furthermore, we present novel calibration techniques such as redundant calibration for arrays with no redundant baselines, representing an alternative calibration method for imaging arrays such as the MWA Phase I. These new calibration approaches could mitigate systematics and reduce calibration error, thereby improving the precision of cosmological measurements.
The measurement of the diffuse $21$-cm radiation from the hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen (HI signal) in different redshifts is an important tool for modern cosmology. However, detecting this faint signal with non-cryogenic receivers in single-dish telescopes is a challenging task. The BINGO (Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from Integrated Neutral Gas Observations) radio telescope is an instrument designed to detect baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the cosmological HI signal, in the redshift interval $0.127 le z le 0.449$. This paper describes the BINGO radio telescope, including the current status of the optics, receiver, observational strategy, calibration and the site. BINGO has been carefully designed to minimize systematics, being a transit instrument with no moving dishes and 28 horns operating in the frequency range $980 le u le 1260$ MHz. Comprehensive laboratory tests were conducted for many of the BINGO subsystems and the prototypes of the receiver chain, horn, polarizer, magic tees and transitions have been successfully tested between 2018-2020. The survey was designed to cover $sim 13%$ of the sky, with the primary mirror pointing at declination $delta=-15^{circ}$. The telescope will see an instantaneous declination strip of $14.75^{circ}$. The results of the prototype tests closely meet those obtained during the modelling process, suggesting BINGO will perform according to our expectations. After one year of observations with a 60% duty cycle, BINGO should achieve an expected sensitivity of $102 mu K$ for 28 horns and 30 redshift bins, considering one polarization and be able to measure the HI power spectrum in a competitive time frame.
Hector will be the new massively-multiplexed integral field spectroscopy (IFS) instrument for the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) in Australia and the next main dark-time instrument for the observatory. Based on the success of the SAMI instrument, which is undertaking a 3400-galaxy survey, the integral field unit (IFU) imaging fibre bundle (hexabundle) technology under-pinning SAMI is being improved to a new innovative design for Hector. The distribution of hexabundle angular sizes is matched to the galaxy survey properties in order to image 90% of galaxies out to 2 effective radii. 50-100 of these IFU imaging bundles will be positioned by starbug robots across a new 3-degree field corrector top end to be purpose-built for the AAT. Many thousand fibres will then be fed into new replicable spectrographs. Fundamentally new science will be achieved compared to existing instruments due to Hectors wider field of view (3 degrees), high positioning efficiency using starbugs, higher spectroscopic resolution (R~3000-5500 from 3727-7761A, with a possible redder extension later) and large IFUs (up to 30 arcsec diameter with 61-217 fibre cores). A 100,000 galaxy IFS survey with Hector will decrypt how the accretion and merger history and large-scale environment made every galaxy different in its morphology and star formation history. The high resolution, particularly in the blue, will make Hector the only instrument to be able to measure higher-order kinematics for galaxies down to much lower velocity dispersion than in current large IFS galaxy surveys, opening up a wealth of new nearby galaxy science.
We report on the MIT Epoch of Reionization (MITEoR) experiment, a pathfinder low-frequency radio interferometer whose goal is to test technologies that improve the calibration precision and reduce the cost of the high-sensitivity 3D mapping required for 21 cm cosmology. MITEoR accomplishes this by using massive baseline redundancy, which enables both automated precision calibration and correlator cost reduction. We demonstrate and quantify the power and robustness of redundancy for scalability and precision. We find that the calibration parameters precisely describe the effect of the instrument upon our measurements, allowing us to form a model that is consistent with $chi^2$ per degree of freedom < 1.2 for as much as 80% of the observations. We use these results to develop an optimal estimator of calibration parameters using Wiener filtering, and explore the question of how often and how finely in frequency visibilities must be reliably measured to solve for calibration coefficients. The success of MITEoR with its 64 dual-polarization elements bodes well for the more ambitious Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) project and other next-generation instruments, which would incorporate many identical or similar technologies.
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) is designed to make high angular resolution measurements of anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) at millimeter wavelengths. We describe ACTPol, an upgraded receiver for ACT, which uses feedhorn-coupled, polarization-sensitive detector arrays, a 3 degree field of view, 100 mK cryogenics with continuous cooling, and meta material anti-reflection coatings. ACTPol comprises three arrays with separate cryogenic optics: two arrays at a central frequency of 148 GHz and one array operating simultaneously at both 97 GHz and 148 GHz. The combined instrument sensitivity, angular resolution, and sky coverage are optimized for measuring angular power spectra, clusters via the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich and kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich signals, and CMB lensing due to large scale structure. The receiver was commissioned with its first 148 GHz array in 2013, observed with both 148 GHz arrays in 2014, and has recently completed its first full season of operations with the full suite of three arrays. This paper provides an overview of the design and initial performance of the receiver and related systems.