CSSI Elements: Accelerating Discovery of the First Stars through a Robust Software Testing Infrastructure

The birth of the first stars and galaxies 13 billions years ago -- our "Cosmic Dawn" -- is one of the last unobserved periods in the history of the Universe. Scientists are working to observe the 21 cm radio light emitted by the primeval neutral hydrogen fog as the first stars formed and reionized the universe. One of the biggest challenges for the detection of the Epoch of Reionization is the presence of bright astrophysical foregrounds that obscures the signal of interest, requiring extraordinarily precise modeling and calibration of the radio telescopes performing these observations. The 21 cm cosmology community is rapidly developing new techniques for instrument calibration, foreground removal and analysis, but thorough testing and integration into existing data analysis pipelines has been slow. This project provides a software infrastructure that enables rigorous, seamless testing of novel algorithmic developments within a unified framework. This infrastructure also ensures a new level of reliability and reproducibility not previously possible and accelerates the speed at which developments become integrated into production level code, providing an invaluable foundation for bringing our field into the next decade and for leveraging the current NSF investments in these experiments.