Understand
Detection of the cosmological neutral hydrogen signal from the Epoch of Reionization, and estimation of its basic physical parameters, is the principal scientific aim of many current low-frequency radio telescopes.
- Here we describe the Cosmological HI Power Spectrum Estimator (CHIPS), an algorithm developed and implemented with data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), to compute the two-dimensional and spherically-averaged power spectrum of brightness temperature fluctuations.
- The principal motivations for CHIPS are the application of realistic instrumental and foreground models to form the optimal estimator, thereby maximising the likelihood of unbiased signal estimation, and allowing a full covariant understanding of the outputs.
- CHIPS employs an inverse-covariance weighting of the data through the maximum likelihood estimator, thereby allowing use of the full parameter space for signal estimation ("foreground suppression").