Daily Image
08-07-2019
First-light for the NenuFAR Cosmic Dawn KSP
| Submitter: | Harish Vedantham |
| Description: | NenuFAR is a low frequency (10 - 85 MHz) radio telescope in Nançay, France. It currently consists of 56 stations of 19 dipoles each, all within a 400-metre diameter circle, with plans to develop into 80 core-stations and 4 remote stations out to 3 km. The entire array can be beamformed into a single LOFAR “superstation”, or it can be used as a stand-alone interferometer with a full-band COBALT-2-like correlator that is being installed. Recently, several members of the LOFAR Epoch of Reionization team proposed a Key Science Project to use NenuFAR to search for the 21-cm signature from the Cosmic Dawn epoch. NenuFAR’s compact configuration is ideally suited to detect the predicted ~ 0.5-deg scale fluctuations from the early Universe. Our proposal was successful, and science observations will commence in July. Shown here is our KSP’s first-light NenuFAR image of the region around the North celestial pole, made with 6hr of data over 2MHz bandwidth around 74 MHz. The dashed cyan circle shows the half-power width of NenuFAR’s primary beam. The image is confusion limited given the large 0.5-deg point spread function. The currently planned 84-station array will have five-times finer resolution and allow for better foreground subtraction. We are now busy honing the observing strategy and preparing the pipelines to reduce the science-data. |
| Copyright: | CC BY-NC-SA |
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