Subtraction of Smooth Foregrounds in Future 21-cm Observations

One of the main challenges for future 21-cm observations is to remove foregrounds which are several orders of magnitude more intense than the HI signal. We propose a new technique for removing foregrounds of the redshifted 21-cm observations. We consider multi-frequency interferometer observations. We assume that the 21-cm signals in different frequency channels are uncorrelated and the foreground signals change slowly as a function of frequency. When we add the visibilities of all channels, the foreground signals increase roughly by a factor of N because they are highly correlated. However, the 21-cm signals increase by a factor of sqrt{N} because the signals in different channels contribute randomly. This enables us to obtain an accurate shape of the foreground angular power spectrum. Then, we obtain the 21-cm power spectrum by subtracting the foreground power spectrum obtained this way. We describe how to obtain the average power spectrum of the 21-cm signal.