Contamination of the Epoch of Reionization power spectrum in the presence of foregrounds

Abstract

We construct foreground simulations comprising spatially correlated extragalactic and diffuse Galactic emission components and calculate the `intrinsic' (instrument-free) two-dimensional spatial power spectrum and the cylindrically and spherically averaged three-dimensional k-space power spectra of the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) and our foreground simulations using a Bayesian power spectral estimation framework. This leads us to identify a model dependent region of optimal signal estimation for our foreground and EoR models, within which the spatial power in the EoR signal relative to foregrounds is maximised. We identify a target field dependent region, in k-space, of intrinsic foreground power spectral contamination at low k_perp and k_parallel and a transition to a relatively foreground-free intrinsic EoR window in the complement to this region. The contaminated region of k-space demonstrates that simultaneous estimation of the EoR and foregrounds is important for obtaining statistically robust estimates of the EoR power spectrum; biased results will be obtained from methodologies that ignore their covariance. Using simulated observations with frequency dependent uv-coverage and primary beam, with the former derived for HERA in 37-antenna and 331-antenna configuration, we recover instrumental power spectra consistent with their intrinsic counterparts. We discuss the implications of these results for optimal strategies for unbiased estimation of the EoR power spectrum.