Simulating the Short Baseline Array of the ngVLA

Parziale, Rachel

Publication

Simulating the Short Baseline Array of the ngVLA

Parziale, Rachel

Description

The Next Generation Very Large Array (ngVLA) is a centimeter-millimeter interferometer consisting of a main array with 214, 18 meter diameter antennas. The largest scale structures the ngVLA can observe are determined by its shortest baselines, which are limited by the diameter of the antennas. The main array by itself achieves insufficient resolution for all science projects planned for the ngVLA as 20% -- 30% of cases require shorter baselines [3]. In order to observe the largest scale structures, the ngVLA will also contain a compact, centrally-located array of antennas in a short baseline configuration referred to as the Short Baseline Array (SBA). The SBA will contain 19, 6 meter diameter antennas to provide supporting data to the ngVLA. Two different configurations for the SBA were investigated: one configuration with regularly spaced antennas and one configuration with randomly spaced antennas. The configurations were investigated by simulating observations of sky images and simulated disks to investigate the PSF deconvolution of the observations and the and flux recovery at different scales. The results show that although it produces more prominent sidelobes, the regularly spaced SBA configuration recovers more flux density than the randomly spaced SBA configuration on scales larger than a diameter of ten arcseconds.