Recovering sky brightness with interferometry: A Fourier domain, Gaussian process approach

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• Jeff Jennings
• Wednesday 20 November 2019, 13:45-14:15
• Sackler Lecture Theatre, IoA.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Catrina Diener.

Interferometric observations from the radio to infrared and optical are faced with a common challenge: recovering a source’s on-sky brightness from sparsely sampled Fourier data. This is often approached as an image reconstruction problem. In sub-mm observations of protoplanetary discs for example, the most common modeling technique, ‘CLEAN,’ operates in the image plane, precluding a full exploitation of the observations’ frequency information. This in turn places a fundamental limit on the model’s accuracy. In this talk I will reframe the problem as a spatial frequency domain analysis, presenting our open source code that fits the interferometric data directly in the Fourier domain with a high resolution, nonparametric and fast Gaussian process. The technique is currently tailored to (sub-)mm observations of protoplanetary discs, using 1D fits to assess these typically symmetric objects. With synthetic and real observations I will motivate how these fits are recovering disc structures beyond the CLEAN imaging resolution ( ‘sub-beam’ ) in both low and high resolution datasets. Noting scientific applications of our model in the protoplanetary disc context, I will then conclude by outlining the code’s planned extensions and potential utility in other physical and frequency regimes.

This talk is part of the Institute of Astronomy Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Cambridge Astronomy Talks
• Combined External Astrophysics Talks DAMTP
• Cosmology lists
• Cosmology, Astrophysics and General Relativity
• Institute of Astronomy Seminars
• Institute of Astronomy Talk Lists
• Kavli Institute for Cosmology Talk Lists
• Priscilla
• Sackler Lecture Theatre, IoA

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