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Register a new userARCADE 2 Measurement of the Extra-Galactic Sky Temperature at 3-90 GHz
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The ARCADE 2 instrument has measured the absolute temperature of the sky at frequencies 3, 8, 10, 30, and 90 GHz, using an open-aperture cryogenic instrument observing at balloon altitudes with no emissive windows between the beam-forming optics and the sky. An external blackbody calibrator provides an {it in situ} reference. Systematic errors were greatly reduced by using differential radiometers and cooling all critical components to physical temperatures approximating the CMB temperature. A linear model is used to compare the output of each radiometer to a set of thermometers on the instrument. Small corrections are made for the residual emission from the flight train, balloon, atmosphere, and foreground Galactic emission. The ARCADE 2 data alone show an extragalactic rise of $50pm7$ mK at 3.3 GHz in addition to a CMB temperature of $2.730pm .004$ K. Combining the ARCADE 2 data with data from the literature shows a background power law spectrum of $T=1.26pm 0.09$ [K] $( u/ u_0)^{-2.60pm 0.04}$ from 22 MHz to 10 GHz ($ u_0=1$ GHz) in addition to a CMB temperature of $2.725pm .001$ K.
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CMB experiments aiming at a precise measurement of the CMB polarization, such as the Planck satellite, need a strong polarized absolute calibrator on the sky to accurately set the detectors polarization angle and the cross-polarization leakage. As the most intense polarized source in the microwave sky at angular scales of few arcminutes, the Crab nebula will be used for this purpose. Our goal was to measure the Crab nebula polarization characteristics at 90 GHz with unprecedented precision. The observations were carried out with the IRAM 30m telescope employing the correlation polarimeter XPOL and using two orthogonally polarized receivers. We processed the Stokes I, Q, and U maps from our observations in order to compute the polarization angle and linear polarization fraction. The first is almost constant in the region of maximum emission in polarization with a mean value of alpha_Sky=152.1+/-0.3 deg in equatorial coordinates, and the second is found to reach a maximum of Pi=30% for the most polarized pixels. We find that a CMB experiment having a 5 arcmin circular beam will see a mean polarization angle of alpha_Sky=149.9+/-0.2 deg and a mean polarization fraction of Pi=8.8+/-0.2%.
We present results from simulations of the extragalactic polarized sky at 1.4 GHz. As the basis for our polarization models, we use a semi-empirical simulation of the extragalactic total intensity (Stokes I) continuum sky developed at the University of Oxford (http://scubed.physics.ox.ac.uk) under the European SKA Design Study (SKADS) initiative, and polarization distributions derived from analysis of polarization observations. By considering a luminosity dependence for the polarization of AGN, we are able to fit the 1.4 GHz polarized source counts derived from the NVSS and the DRAO ELAIS N1 deep field survey down to approximately 1 mJy. This trend is confirmed by analysis of the polarization of a complete sample of bright AGN. We are unable to fit the additional flattening of the polarized source counts from the deepest observations of the ELAIS N1 survey, which go down to ~0.5 mJy. Below 1 mJy in Stokes I at 1.4 GHz, starforming galaxies become an increasingly important fraction of all radio sources. We use a spiral galaxy integrated polarization model to make realistic predictions of the number of polarized sources at microJy levels in polarized flux density and hence, realistic predictions of what the next generation radio telescopes such as ASKAP, other SKA pathfinders and the SKA itself will see.
We use absolutely calibrated data from the ARCADE 2 flight in July 2006 to model Galactic emission at frequencies 3, 8, and 10 GHz. The spatial structure in the data is consistent with a superposition of free-free and synchrotron emission. Emission with spatial morphology traced by the Haslam 408 MHz survey has spectral index beta_synch = -2.5 +/- 0.1, with free-free emission contributing 0.10 +/- 0.01 of the total Galactic plane emission in the lowest ARCADE 2 band at 3.15 GHz. We estimate the total Galactic emission toward the polar caps using either a simple plane-parallel model with csc|b| dependence or a model of high-latitude radio emission traced by the COBE/FIRAS map of CII emission. Both methods are consistent with a single power-law over the frequency range 22 MHz to 10 GHz, with total Galactic emission towards the north polar cap T_Gal = 0.498 +/- 0.028 K and spectral index beta = -2.55 +/- 0.03 at reference frequency 1 GHz. The well calibrated ARCADE 2 maps provide a new test for spinning dust emission, based on the integrated intensity of emission from the Galactic plane instead of cross-correlations with the thermal dust spatial morphology. The Galactic plane intensity measured by ARCADE 2 is fainter than predicted by models without spinning dust, and is consistent with spinning dust contributing 0.4 +/- 0.1 of the Galactic plane emission at 22 GHz.
We characterize the Millimeter Astronomy Legacy Team 90 GHz (MALT90) Survey and the Mopra telescope at 90 GHz. We combine repeated position-switched observations of the source G300.968+01.145 with a map of the same source in order to estimate the pointing reliability of the position-switched observations and, by extension, the MALT90 survey; we estimate our pointing uncertainty to be 8 arcseconds. We model the two strongest sources of systematic gain variability as functions of elevation and time-of-day and quantify the remaining absolute flux uncertainty. Corrections based on these two variables reduce the scatter in repeated observations from 12-25% down to 10-17%. We find no evidence for intrinsic source variability in G300.968+01.145. For certain applications, the corrections described herein will be integral for improving the absolute flux calibration of MALT90 maps and other observations using the Mopra telescope at 90 GHz.
Using the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor, we measure the disk-averaged absolute Venus brightness temperature to be 432.3 $pm$ 2.8 K and 355.6 $pm$ 1.3 K in the Q and W frequency bands centered at 38.8 and 93.7 GHz, respectively. At both frequency bands, these are the most precise measurements to date. Furthermore, we observe no phase dependence of the measured temperature in either band. Our measurements are consistent with a CO$_2$-dominant atmospheric model that includes trace amounts of additional absorbers like SO$_2$ and H$_2$SO$_4$.
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