No Arabic abstract
We present results from a four frequency observation of a 6 x 0.6 degree strip of the sky centered near the star Gamma Ursae Minoris during the fourth flight of the Millimeter-wave Anisotropy eXperiment (MAX). The observation was made with a 1.4 degree peak-to-peak sinusoidal chop in all bands. The FWHM beam sizes were 0.55 +/- 0.05 degrees at 3.5 cm-1 and 0.75 +/-0.05 degrees at 6, 9, and 14 cm-1. During this observation significant correlated structure was observed at 3.5, 6 and 9 cm-1 with amplitudes similar to those observed in the GUM region during the second and third flights of MAX. The frequency spectrum is consistent with CMB and inconsistent with thermal emission from interstellar dust. The extrapolated amplitudes of synchrotron and free-free emission are too small to account for the amplitude of the observed structure. If all of the structure is attributed to CMB anisotropy with a Gaussian autocorrelation function and a coherence angle of 25, then the most probable values of DeltaT/TCMB in the 3.5, 6, and 9 cm-1 bands are 4.3 (+2.7, -1.6) x 10-5, 2.8 (+4.3, -1.1) x 10-5, and 3.5 (+3.0, -1.6) x 10-5 (95% confidence upper and lower limits), respectively.
Observations of the microwave sky using the Python telescope in its fifth season of operation at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica are presented. The system consists of a 0.75 m off-axis telescope instrumented with a HEMT amplifier-based radiometer having continuum sensitivity from 37-45 GHz in two frequency bands. With a 0.91 deg x 1.02 deg beam the instrument fully sampled 598 deg^2 of sky, including fields measured during the previous four seasons of Python observations. Interpreting the observed fluctuations as anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background, we place constraints on the angular power spectrum of fluctuations in eight multipole bands up to l ~ 260. The observed spectrum is consistent with both the COBE experiment and previous Python results. There is no significant contamination from known foregrounds. The results show a discernible rise in the angular power spectrum from large (l ~ 40) to small (l ~ 200) angular scales. The shape of the observed power spectrum is not a simple linear rise but has a sharply increasing slope starting at l ~ 150.
During the fifth flight of the Microwave Anisotropy Experiment (MAX5), we revisited a region with significant dust emission near the star Mu Pegasi. A 3.5 cm$^{-1}$ low frequency channel has been added since the previous measurement (cite{mei93a}). The data in each channel clearly show structure correlated with IRAS 100 micron dust emission. The spectrum of the structure in the 6, 9 and 14 cm$^{-1}$ channels is described by $I_{ u}propto u^{beta}B_{ u}(T_{dust})$, where $beta$ = 1.3 and $T_{dust}$ = 19~K and $B_{ u}$ is the Planck function. However, this model predicts a smaller amplitude in the 3.5 cm$^{-1}$ band than is observed. Considering only linear combinations of the data independent of the best fit foreground spectrum for the three lower channels, we find an upper limit to CMBR fluctuations of $Delta T/T = langle frac{C_l~l(l+1)}{2pi}rangle^{frac{1}{2}} leq 1.3times 10^{-5}$ at the 95% confidence level. The result is for a flat band power spectrum and does not include a 10% uncertainty in calibration. It is consistent with our previous observation in the region.
We cross-correlate the Saskatoon Ka and Q-Band Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data with different maps to quantify possible foreground contamination. We detect a marginal correlation (2 sigma) with the Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE) 240, 140 and 100 microm maps, but we find no significant correlation with point sources, with the Haslam 408 MHz map or with the Reich and Reich 1420 MHz map. The rms amplitude of the component correlated with DIRBE is about 20% of the CMB signal. Interpreting this component as free-free emission, this normalization agrees with that of Kogut et al. (1996a; 1996b) and supports the hypothesis that the spatial correlation between dust and warm ionized gas observed on large angular scales persists to smaller angular scales. Subtracting this contribution from the CMB data reduces the normalization of the Saskatoon power spectrum by only a few percent.
The trispectrum of the cosmic microwave background can be used to assess the level of non-Gaussianity on cosmological scales. It probes the fourth order moment, as a function of angular scale, of the probability distribution function of fluctuations and has been shown to be sensitive to primordial non-gaussianity, secondary anisotropies (such as the Ostriker-Vishniac effect) and systematic effects (such as astrophysical foregrounds). In this paper we develop a formalism for estimating the trispectrum from high resolution sky maps which incorporates the impact of finite sky coverage. This leads to a series of operations applied to the data set to minimize the effects of contamination due to the Gaussian component and correlations between estimates at different scales. To illustrate the effect of the estimation process, we apply our procedure to the BOOMERanG data set and show that it is consistent with Gaussianity. This work presents the first estimation of the CMB trispectrum on sub-degree scales.
In this paper we develop the theory of clusterization of peaks in a Gaussian random field. We have obtained new mathematical results from this theory and the theory of percolation and have proposed a topological method of analysis of sky maps based on these results. We have simulated $10^otimes10^o$ sky maps of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy expected from different cosmological models with $0.5^o-1^o$ resolution in order to demonstrate how this method can be used for detection of non-Gaussian noise in the maps and detection of the Doppler-peak in the spectrum of perturbation of $gD T/T$.