Periodic Reporting for period 4 - AIDA (An Illumination of the Dark Ages: modeling reionization and interpreting observations)
Reporting period: 2019-11-01 to 2021-04-30
Our work resulted in: (i) the first ever detection of on-going reionization from the spectrum of a redshift 7 quasar; (ii) the first ever Bayesian parameter estimates for current observations and upcoming cosmic 21-cm observations; (iii) 21cmMC - a public code capable of forward modeling full 4D realizations of the first billion years of our Universe. The tools we developed are being used to interpret the data from all cosmic 21-cm telescopes. Ultimately with the advent of upcoming data from the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), AIDA will help us understand the mysterious origins of the structures of our Universe.
The other main focus of our efforts was how to make sense of upcoming cosmic 21cm observations. Powerful radio telescopes are set to 'image' the Epoch of Reionization and the Cosmic Dawn. They will map out the majority of the visible volume of our Universe, driving a data-rich revolution in astrophysics and cosmology. The patterns they discover will tell us about the nature of the very first galaxies. We created the theoretical framework which will be used to interpret these upcoming observations. We made forecasts showing how these telescopes will nail down important physical properties of the first galaxies, to orders of magnitude better precision than is available with today's observations. Our code is public on github and is used by all of the relevant telescopes.
Our results were published in peer-reviewed journals, and all work was made immediately available on the arXiv pre-print server. Our team presented the results in many international conferences and workshops. The codes we developed and improved, 21cmFAST and 21cmMC, are publicly available on the github repository. These codes are used by independent researchers in over 25 countries around the globe.