The BINGO Radio Telescope: an instrument to investigate the Universe through the 21 cm neutral hydrogen line
Authors/Creators
Description
Title: The BINGO Radio Telescope: an instrument to investigate the Universe through the 21 cm neutral hydrogen line
Thematic areas: Cosmology, Dark Energy, Astronomy & Astrophysics
Primary authors: Elcio Abdalla, Carlos Alexandre Wuensche, Luciano Barosi de Lemos, Filipe Abdalla
Contact person: Carlos Alexandre Wuensche (ca.wuensche@inpe.br) Webpage of the project: https://portal.if.usp.br/bingotelescope/pt-br
Abstract: BINGO is a unique radio telescope designed to make the first detection of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) at radio frequencies. This will be achieved by measuring the distribution of neutral hydrogen gas (HI) at cosmological distances using a technique called Intensity Mapping. Along with the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies, the scale of BAO is one of the most powerful probes of cosmological parameters, including dark energy. The telescope will be built in a very low RFI site in Aguiar (Paraíba), in Northeastern Brazil (coordinates Lat:7° 2’ 29” S; Lon: 38° 16’ 30” W). It will operate in the frequency range from 0.98 GHz to 1.26 GHz. The telescope design consists in a compact, crossed-Dragone configuration with two 40-m compact mirrors and no moving parts. Such a design will give the excellent polarization performance and very low sidelobe levels required for HI intensity mapping. With a feedhorn array of 50 receivers, it will map a 15° declination strip as the sky drifts past the field-of-view of the telescope. The BINGO consortium is coordinated by the Universidade de São Paulo, and co-led by Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais and Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (Brazil) and has the University of Manchester and University College London (United Kingdom), ETH Zürich (Switzerland), Yang Zhou University (China) and University of KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) as foreign partners. The receiver, including the horns and all the electronics, is mostly ready for fabrication and the mirrors and the telescope structure are in the final design and construction project phases. The data analysis pipeline and science forecasts are being led by a Brazilian team and we expect to deliver a number of papers in 2020 regarding the simulation of BINGO science capabilities. BINGO will also have a strong synergy with a number of optical and radio instruments that will visit parts of the BINGO observed patch in the sky (~ 5400 square degrees) allowing for an immediate multiwavelength approach for BINGO data analysis.