Modeling the Extragalactic Epoch of Reionization Foreground

Abstract

The Epoch of Reionization represents a largely unexplored yet fundamental chapter of the early universe. During this period, spanning several hundred million years, the first stars and galaxies formed and the Hydrogen-dominated intergalactic medium transitioned from a predominantly neutral to ionized state. Modern efforts to study exactly when and how reionization occurred are largely focused on the distribution of neutral Hydrogen gas and its evolution in response to the increasing abundance of luminous objects and ionizing flux. The Murchison Widefield Array is a low frequency radio interferometer designed as a first generation EoR experiment. The predominant systematic difficulty in making a detection of the primordial HI signal is the overwhelmingly bright emission from the intervening fore- ground galaxies and quasars. This thesis presents novel survey methods used to create a highly precise and reliable catalog of discrete extragalactic sources for the purposes of both calibration and foreground removal.