Hydrogen intensity mapping with MeerKAT: Preserving cosmological signal by optimising contaminant separation
Isabella P. Carucci, José L Bernal, Steven Cunnington, Mário G. Santos, Jingying Wang, José Fonseca, Keith Grainge, Melis O Irfan, Yichao Li, Alkistis Pourtsidou, Marta Spinelli, Laura Wolz
Abstract
Removing contaminants is a delicate, yet crucial step in neutral hydrogen (H I ) intensity mapping and often considered the technique’s greatest challenge. Here, we address this challenge by analysing H I intensity maps of about 100 deg 2 at redshift z ≈ 0.4 collected by the MeerKAT radio telescope, an SKA Observatory (SKAO) precursor, with a combined 10.5-hour observation. Using unsupervised statistical methods, we removed the contaminating foreground emission and systematically tested, step-by-step, some common pre-processing choices to facilitate the cleaning process. We also introduced and tested a novel multiscale approach: the data were redundantly decomposed into subsets referring to different spatial scales (large and small), where the cleaning procedure was performed independently. We confirm the detection of the H I cosmological signal in cross-correlation with an ancillary galactic data set, without the need to correct for signal loss. In the best set-up we achieved, we were able to constrain the H I distribution through the combination of its cosmic abundance (Ω H I ) and linear clustering bias ( b H I ) up to a cross-correlation coefficient ( r ). We measured Ω H I b H I r = [0.93 ± 0.17] × 10 −3 with a ≈6 σ confidence, which is independent of scale cuts at both edges of the probed scale range (0.04 ≲ k ≲ 0.3 h Mpc −1 ), corroborating its robustness. Our new pipeline has successfully found an optimal compromise in separating contaminants without incurring a catastrophic signal loss. This development instills an added degree of confidence in the outstanding science we can deliver with MeerKAT on the path towards H I intensity mapping surveys with the full SKAO.