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arXiv 1910.04529astro-ph.IM
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方向相关电离层校准的概率方法

A probabilistic approach to direction-dependent ionospheric calibration

J. G. Albert, M. S. S. L. Oei, R. J. van Weeren, H. T. Intema, H. J. A. Röttgering

摘要:

校准可视性数据中依赖于方向的电离层扭曲是推进低频射电天文学必须克服的主要技术挑战之一。在本文中,我们提出了一种新的概率,层析成像的方法,利用高斯过程来校准方向相关的电离层相位失真的低频干涉数据。我们建议,电离层自由电子密度可以模拟到一个很好的近似高斯过程限制在一个厚的单层,并表明,在此假设下的微分总电子含量也必须是一个高斯过程。我们进行了比较与其他一些广泛成功的高斯过程模拟微分总电子含量在广泛的实验条件下,并发现,在所有的实验条件下,我们的模型能够更好地代表观察到的数据和概括看不见的数据。我们的预测误差所施加的平均等效源位移是最好的竞争对手模型的一半大。我们发现,这是可能的,部分约束电离层的超参数从稀疏和嘈杂的观测数据。我们的模型提供了一个替代的解释观察到的相位结构函数偏离Kolmogorov的5/3湍流,营业额在高基线,衍射尺度各向异性。我们表明,我们的模型隐含便宜地执行断层扫描的自由电子密度。此外,我们发现,即使是一个快速的,低分辨率的近似我们的模型产生更好的结果比最好的替代高斯过程,这意味着方向和天线之间的几何耦合是一个强大的先验,不应该被忽视。

英文摘要:

Calibrating for direction-dependent ionospheric distortions in visibility data is one of the main technical challenges that must be overcome to advance low-frequency radio astronomy. In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic, tomographic approach that utilises Gaussian processes to calibrate direction-dependent ionospheric phase distortions in low-frequency interferometric data. We suggest that the ionospheric free electron density can be modelled to good approximation by a Gaussian process restricted to a thick single layer, and show that under this assumption the differential total electron content must also be a Gaussian process. We perform a comparison with a number of other widely successful Gaussian processes on simulated differential total electron contents over a wide range of experimental conditions, and find that, in all experimental conditions, our model is better able to represent observed data and generalise to unseen data. The mean equivalent source shift imposed by our predictive errors are half as large as the best competitor model's. We find that it is possible to partially constrain the ionosphere's hyperparameters from sparse-and-noisy observed data. Our model provides an alternative explanation for observed phase structure functions deviating from Kolmogorov's 5/3 turbulence, turnover at high baselines, and diffractive scale anisotropy. We show that our model implicitly cheaply performs tomography of the free electron density. Moreover, we find that even a fast, low-resolution approximation to our model yields better results than the best alternative Gaussian process, implying that the geometric coupling between directions and antennae is a powerful prior that should not be ignored.

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