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Register a new userDiscriminating between unresolved point sources and negative SZ clusters in CMB maps
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J. A. Rubino-Martin
Publication date
2002
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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Clusters of galaxies produce negative features at wavelengths $lambda > 1.25$ mm in CMB maps, by means of the thermal SZ effect, while point radio sources produce positive peaks. This fact implies that a distribution of unresolved SZ clusters could be detected using the negative asymmetry introduced in the odd-moments of the brightness map (skewness and higher), or in the probability distribution function (PDF) for the fluctuations, once the map has been filtered in order to remove the contribution from primordial CMB fluctuations from large scales. This property provides a consistency check to the recent detections from CBI and BIMA experiments of an excess of power at small angular scales, in order to confirm that they are produced by a distribution of unresolved SZ clusters. However it will require at least 1.5 - 2 times more observing time than detection of corresponding power signal. This approach could also be used with the data of the planned SZ experiments (e.g. ACT, AMI, AMIBA, APEX, 8 m South Pole telescope).
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We present a new approach to the statistical study and modelling of number counts of faint point sources in astronomical images, i.e. counts of sources whose flux falls below the detection limit of a survey. The approach is based on the theory of alpha-stable distributions. We show that the non-Gaussian distribution of the intensity fluctuations produced by a generic point source population -- whose number counts follow a simple power law -- belongs to the alpha-stable family of distributions. Even if source counts do not follow a simple power law, we show that the alpha-stable model is still useful in many astrophysical scenarios. With the alpha-stable model it is possible to totally describe the non-Gaussian distribution with a few parameters which are closely related to the parameters describing the source counts, instead of an infinite number of moments. Using statistical tools available in the signal processing literature, we show how to estimate these parameters in an easy and fast way. We demonstrate that the model proves valid when applied to realistic point source number counts at microwave frequencies. In the case of point extragalactic sources observed at CMB frecuencies, our technique is able to successfully fitting the P(D) distribution of deflections and to precisely determining the main parameters which describe the number counts. In the case of the Planck mission, the relative errors on these parameters are small either at low and at high frequencies. We provide a way to deal with the presence of Gaussian noise in the data using the empirical characteristic function of the P(D). The formalism and methods here presented can be very useful also for experiments in other frequency ranges, e.g. X-ray or radio Astronomy.
The detection and flux estimation of point sources in cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps is a very important task in order to clean the maps and also to obtain relevant astrophysical information. In this paper we propose a maximum a posteriori (MAP) approach detection method in a Bayesian scheme which incorporates prior information about the source flux distribution, the locations and the number of sources. We apply this method to CMB simulations with the characteristics of the Planck satellite channels at 30, 44, 70 and 100 GHz. With a similar level of spurious sources, our method yields more complete catalogues than the matched filter with a 5 sigma threshold. Besides, the new technique allows us to fix the number of detected sources in a non-arbitrary way.
The Galactic Center Excess (GCE) of GeV gamma rays can be explained as a signal of annihilating dark matter or of emission from unresolved astrophysical sources, such as millisecond pulsars. Evidence for the latter is provided by a statistical procedure---referred to as Non-Poissonian Template Fitting (NPTF)---that distinguishes the smooth distribution of photons expected for dark matter annihilation from a clumpy photon distribution expected for point sources. In this paper, we perform an extensive study of the NPTF on simulated data, exploring its ability to recover the flux and luminosity function of unresolved sources at the Galactic Center. When astrophysical background emission is perfectly modeled, we find that the NPTF successfully distinguishes between the dark matter and point source hypotheses when either component makes up the entirety of the GCE. When the GCE is a mixture of dark matter and point sources, the NPTF may fail to reconstruct the correct contribution of each component. We further study the impact of mismodeling the Galactic diffuse backgrounds, finding that while a dark matter signal could be attributed to point sources in some outlying cases for the scenarios we consider, the significance of a true point source signal remains robust. Our work enables us to comment on a recent study by Leane and Slatyer (2019) that questions prior NPTF conclusions because the method does not recover an artificial dark matter signal injected on actual Fermi data. We demonstrate that the failure of the NPTF to extract an artificial dark matter signal can be natural when point sources are present in the data---with the effect further exacerbated by the presence of diffuse mismodeling---and does not on its own invalidate the conclusions of the NPTF analysis in the Inner Galaxy.
We use the Planck LFI 70GHz data to further probe point source detection technique in the sky maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The method developed by Tegmark et al. for foreground reduced maps and the Kolmogorov parameter as the descriptor are adopted for the analysis of Planck satellite CMB temperature data. Most of the detected points coincide with point sources already revealed by other methods. However, we have also found 9 source candidates for which still no counterparts are known.
Precision measurement of the scalar perturbation spectral index, n_s, from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe temperature angular power spectrum requires the subtraction of unresolved point source power. Here we reconsider this issue. First, we note a peculiarity in the WMAP temperature likelihoods response to the source correction: Cosmological parameters do not respond to increased source errors. An alternative and more direct method for treating this error term acts more sensibly, and also shifts n_s by ~0.3 sigma closer to unity. Second, we re-examine the source fit used to correct the power spectrum. This fit depends strongly on the galactic cut and the weighting of the map, indicating that either the source population or masking procedure is not isotropic. Jackknife tests appear inconsistent, causing us to assign large uncertainties to account for possible systematics. Third, we note that the WMAP teams spectrum was computed with two different weighting schemes: uniform weights transition to inverse noise variance weights at l = 500. The fit depends on such weighting schemes, so different corrections apply to each multipole range. For the Kp2 mask used in cosmological analysis, we prefer source corrections A = 0.012 +/- 0.005 muK^2 for uniform weighting and A = 0.015 +/- 0.005 muK^2 for N_obs weighting. Correcting WMAPs spectrum correspondingly, we compute cosmological parameters with our alternative likelihood, finding n_s = 0.970 +/- 0.017 and sigma_8 = 0.778 +/- 0.045 . This n_s is only 1.8 sigma from unity, compared to the ~2.6 sigma WMAP 3-year result. Finally, an anomalous feature in the source spectrum at l<200 remains, most strongly associated with W-band.
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