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By Adrian Liu, Max Tegmark, Judd Bowman, Jacqueline Hewitt, Matias Zaldarriaga
21-cm tomography is expected to be difficult in part because of serious foreground contamination. Previous studies have found that line-of-sight approaches are capable of cleaning foregrounds to an acceptable level on large spatial scales, but not on small spatial scales. In this paper, we introduce a Fourier space formalism for describing the line-of-sight methods, and use it to introduce an improved new method for 21-cm foreground cleaning. Heuristically, this method involves fitting foregrounds in Fourier space using weighted polynomial fits, with each pixel weighted according to its information content. We show that the new method reproduces the old one on large angular scales, and gives marked improvements on small scales at essentially no extra computational cost.
An Improved method for 21-cm foreground removal
September 1, 2009
ArXiv link: 0903.4890
NASA ADS: 2009MNRAS.398..401L
MNRAS link: Click here
Published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 398, Issue 1, pages 401-406, September 2009