A measurement of Galactic synchrotron emission using MWA drift scan observations

TL;DR

This paper measures the angular power spectrum of Galactic synchrotron emission at 154.2 MHz using MWA drift scan data, fitting a model to understand its properties and compare with previous results.

Contribution

It presents a novel measurement of the DGSE power spectrum over multiple sky regions using MWA drift scans and applies a detailed modeling and MCMC analysis.

Findings

The power spectrum amplitude varies between 155 and 400 mK^2.

The spectral index beta ranges from 0.9 to 1.7.

Results are consistent with earlier measurements at similar frequencies.

Abstract

Studying the diffuse Galactic synchrotron emission (hereafter, DGSE) at arc-minute angular scale is important to remove the foregrounds for the cosmological 21-cm observations. Statistical measurements of the large-scale DGSE can also be used to constrain the magnetic field and the cosmic ray electron density of our Galaxy's interstellar medium (ISM). Here, we have used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) drift scan observations at $154.2 \, {\rm MHz}$ to measure the angular power spectrum $({\cal C}_{\ell})$ of the DGSE of a region of the sky from right ascension (RA) $349^{\circ}$ to $70.3^{\circ}$ at the fixed declination $-26.7^{\circ}$. In this RA range, we have chosen 24 pointing centers (PCs), for which we have removed all the bright point sources above $\sim430 \, {\rm mJy}\,(3\sigma)$, and applied the Tapered Gridded Estimator (TGE) on residual data to estimate the ${\cal C}_{\ell}$. We use the angular multipole range $65 \le \ell \le 650$ to fit the data with a model, ${\cal C}^M_{\ell}=A\times \left(\frac{1000}{\ell}\right)^{\beta}+C$, where we interpret the model as the combination of a power law $(\propto \ell^{-\beta})$ nature of the DGSE and a constant part due to the Poisson fluctuations of the residual point sources. We are able to fit the model ${\cal C}^M_{\ell}$ for six PCs centered at $\alpha=352.5^{\circ}, 353^{\circ}, 357^{\circ}, 4.5^{\circ}, 4^{\circ}$ and $1^{\circ}$. We run the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) ensemble sampler to get the best-fit values of the parameters $A, \beta$ and $C$ for these PCs. We see that the values of $A$ vary in the range $155$ to $400$ mK$^{2}$, whereas the $\beta$ varies in the range $0.9$ to $1.7$. We find that the value of $\beta$ is consistent at $2-\sigma$ level with the earlier measurement of the DGSE at similar frequency and angular scales.