The Search for Ionospheric Effects at 150 MHz with PAPER

Details The Search for Ionospheric Effects at 150 MHz with PAPER The Search for Ionospheric Effects at 150 MHz with PAPER

Jan 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21941303g&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #413.03

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

PAPER (the Precision Array to Probe the Epoch of Reionization) is a telescope designed to detect the redshifted hydrogen signal from the early universe. The hydrogen is at a redshift of approximately 6-14, bringing the spin-flip transition of neutral hydrogen from 1.4 GHz to a regime between 100 and 230 GHz. PAPER has a test site with 32 antennas in the Radio Quiet Zone of Green Bank, West Virginia, and a 64-antenna array at the Square Kilometer Array candidate site in the Karoo, South Africa.
Astronomical observations at such low frequencies are made more challenging by the refractive properties of the ionosphere. We present the angular shifts in bright source positions (Cyg A, Cas A, Vir A, and Tau A) as probes of the variations in the total electron content (TEC) along the lines of sight between the sources and the 32-element array in Green Bank. With an integration time of 10 seconds, we can probe for the small fluctuations, using the visibilities, that may be the most difficult to calibrate in upcoming experiments and observations. More sensitive probes of longer timescales are also done by imaging the sky with both the 32 and 64-element arrays. Here again, the bright source position stability is used as an indicator of the TEC stability. The wideband nature of the PAPER instrument enables it to probe the effects of a varying TEC over a nearly 100 MHz bandwidth. We compare these measurements to more traditional methods of probing the ionosphere, such as GPS satellites, and we discuss the implications that these measurements will have on experiments aimed at detecting the epoch of reionization.

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