The BINGO project

Abstract

Context. A new and promising technique for observing the Universe and study the dark sector is the intensity mapping of the redshifted 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen (H I). The Baryon Acoustic Oscillations [BAO] from Integrated Neutral Gas Observations (BINGO) radio telescope will use the 21 cm line to map the Universe in the redshift range 0.127 ≤ z ≤ 0.449 in a tomographic approach, with the main goal of probing the BAO. Aims. This work presents the forecasts of measuring the transversal BAO signal during the BINGO phase 1 operation. Methods. We used two clustering estimators: the two-point angular correlation function (ACF) in configuration space, and the angular power spectrum (APS) in harmonic space. We also used a template-based method to model the ACF and APS estimated from simulations of the BINGO region and to extract the BAO information. The tomographic approach allows the combination of redshift bins to improve the template fitting performance. We computed the ACF and APS for each of the 30 redshift bins and measured the BAO signal in three consecutive redshift blocks (lower, intermediate, and higher) of ten channels each. Robustness tests were used to evaluate several aspects of the BAO fitting pipeline for the two clustering estimators. Results. We find that each clustering estimator shows different sensitivities to specific redshift ranges, although both of them perform better at higher redshifts. In general, the APS estimator provides slightly better estimates, with smaller uncertainties and a higher probability of detecting the BAO signal, achieving ≳90% at higher redshifts. We investigate the contribution from instrumental noise and residual foreground signals and find that the former has the greater impact. It becomes more significant with increasing redshift, in particular for the APS estimator. When noise is included in the analysis, the uncertainty increases by up to a factor of ∼2.2 at higher redshifts. Foreground residuals, in contrast, do not significantly affect our final uncertainties. Conclusions. In summary, our results show that even when semi-realistic systematic effects are included, BINGO has the potential to successfully measure the BAO scale at radio frequencies.