Reionization and the Cosmic Dawn with the Square Kilometre Array

By G. Mellema, Leon V. E. Koopmans, F. Abdalla, G. Bernardi, Benedetta Ciardi, S. Daiboo, G. D. Bruyn, K. Datta, Heino Falcke, A. Ferrara and 18 more. 2012

283 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will have a low frequency component (SKA-low) which has as one of its main science goals the study of the redshifted 21 cm line from the earliest phases of star and galaxy formation in the Universe. This 21 cm signal provides a new and unique window both on the time of the formation of the first stars and accreting black holes and the subsequent period of substantial ionization of the intergalactic medium. The signal will teach us fundamental new things about the earliest phases of structure formation, cosmology and even has the potential to lead to the discovery of new physical phenomena. Here we present a white paper with an overview of the science questions that SKA-low can address, how we plan to tackle these questions and what this implies for the basic design of the telescope.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e2049903e64c47ec7a75369ae705eda4d28ff49b

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Citations in the corpus

The realm of the galaxy protoclusters (2016, background): “…the epoch of reionization The epoch of reionization (EoR), during which hydrogen in the universe transitioned from being mostly neutral to being mostly ionized, is an extremely important event for cosmology, structure formation and galaxy evolution (e.g., see Mellema et al., 2013, for a review).”
21CMMC: an MCMC analysis tool enabling astrophysical parameter studies of the cosmic 21 cm signal (2015, methodology): “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.”
Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) (2016, background): “These results are a necessary component to enable future arrays like the Square Kilometre Array (SKA; e.g. Mellema et al. 2013; Greig et al. 2015) to do detailed mapping of structures over the entire sky.”