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Register a new userCosmic microwave background maps from the HACME experiment
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We present Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) maps from the Santa Barbara HACME balloon experiment (Staren etal 2000), covering about 1150 square degrees split between two regions in the northern sky, near the stars gamma Ursae Minoris and alpha Leonis, respectively. The FWHM of the beam is about 0.77 degrees in three frequency bands centered on 39, 41 and 43 GHz. The results demonstrate that the thoroughly interconnected scan strategy employed allows efficient removal of 1/f-noise and slightly variable scan-synchronous offsets. The maps display no striping, and the noise correlations are found to be virtually isotropic, decaying on an angular scale around one degree. The noise performance of the experiment resulted in an upper limit on CMB anisotropy. However, our results demonstrate that atmospheric contamination and other systematics resulting from the circular scanning strategy can be accurately controlled, and bodes well for the planned follow-up experiments BEAST and ACE, since they show that even with the overly cautious assumption that 1/f-noise and offsets will be as dominant as for HACME, the problems they pose can be readily overcome with the mapmaking algorithm discussed. Our prewhitened notch-filter algorithm for destriping and offset removal should be useful also for other balloon- and ground-based experiments whose scan strategies involve substantial interleaving.
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We discuss the potential of a next generation space-borne CMB experiment for studies of extragalactic sources with reference to COrE+, a project submitted to ESA in response to the M4 call. We consider three possible options for the telescope size: 1m, 1.5m and 2m (although the last option is probably impractical, given the M4 boundary conditions). The proposed instrument will be far more sensitive than Planck and will have a diffraction-limited angular resolution. These properties imply that even the 1m telescope option will perform substantially better than Planck for studies of extragalactic sources. The source detection limits as a function of frequency have been estimated by means of realistic simulations. The most significant improvements over Planck results are presented for each option. COrE+ will provide much larger samples of truly local star-forming galaxies, making possible analyses of the properties of galaxies (luminosity functions, dust mass functions, star formation rate functions, dust temperature distributions, etc.) across the Hubble sequence. Even more interestingly, COrE+ will detect, at |b|> 30 deg, thousands of strongly gravitationally lensed galaxies. Such large samples are of extraordinary astrophysical and cosmological value in many fields. Moreover, COrE+ high frequency maps will be optimally suited to pick up proto-clusters of dusty galaxies, i.e. to investigate the evolution of large scale structure at larger redshifts than can be reached by other means. Thanks to its high sensitivity COrE+ will also yield a spectacular advance in the blind detection of extragalactic sources in polarization. This will open a new window for studies of radio source polarization and of the global properties of magnetic fields in star forming galaxies and of their relationships with SFRs.
We present the first sky maps from the BEAST (Background Emission Anisotropy Scanning Telescope) experiment. BEAST consists of a 2.2 meter off axis Gregorian telescope fed by a cryogenic millimeter wavelength focal plane currently consisting of 6 Q band (40 GHz) and 2 Ka band (30 GHz) scalar feed horns feeding cryogenic HEMT amplifiers. Data were collected from two balloon-borne flights in 2000, followed by a lengthy ground observing campaign from the 3.8 Km altitude University of California White Mountain Research Station. This paper reports the initial results from the ground based observations. The instrument produced an annular map covering the sky from declinateion 33 to 42 degrees. The maps cover an area of 2470 square degrees with an effective resolution of 23 arcminutes FWHM at 40 GHz and 30 arcminutes at 30 GHz. The map RMS (smoothed to 30 arcminutes and excluding galactic foregrounds) is 54 +-5 microK at 40 GHz. Comparison with the instrument noise gives a cosmic signal RMS contribution of 28 +-3 microK. An estimate of the actual CMB sky signal requires taking into account the l-space filter function of our experiment and analysis techniques, carried out in a companion paper (ODwyer et al. 2003). In addition to the robust detection of CMB anisotropies, we find a strong correlation between small portions of our maps and features in recent H$alpha$ maps (Finkbeiner, 2003). In this work we describe the data set and analysis techniques leading to the maps, including data selection, filtering, pointing reconstruction, mapmaking algorithms and systematic effects. A detailed description of the experiment appears in Childers et al. (2003).
The blackbody radiation left over from the Big Bang has been transformed by the expansion of the Universe into the nearly isotropic 2.73K Cosmic Microwave Background. Tiny inhomogeneities in the early Universe left their imprint on the microwave background in the form of small anisotropies in its temperature. These anisotropies contain information about basic cosmological parameters, particularly the total energy density and curvature of the universe. Here we report the first images of resolved structure in the microwave background anisotropies over a significant part of the sky. Maps at four frequencies clearly distinguish the microwave background from foreground emission. We compute the angular power spectrum of the microwave background, and find a peak at Legendre multipole $ell_{peak}=(197 pm 6)$, with an amplitude $DT_{200}=(69 pm 8)mu K$. This is consistent with that expected for cold dark matter models in a flat (euclidean) Universe, as favoured by standard inflationary scenarios.
Cosmology has made enormous progress through studies of the cosmic microwave background, however the subtle signals being now sought such as B-mode polarisation due to primordial gravitational waves are increasingly hard to disentangle from residual Galactic foregrounds in the derived CMB maps. We revisit our finding that on large angular scales there are traces of the nearby old supernova remnant Loop I in the WMAP 9-year map of the CMB and confirm this with the new SMICA map from the Planck satellite.
We apply our symmetry based Power tensor technique to test conformity of PLANCK Polarization maps with statistical isotropy. On a wide range of angular scales (l=40-150), our preliminary analysis detects many statistically anisotropic multipoles in foreground cleaned full sky PLANCK polarization maps viz., COMMANDER and NILC. We also study the effect of residual foregrounds that may still be present in the galactic plane using both common UPB77 polarization mask, as well as the individual component separation method specific polarization masks. However some of the statistically anisotropic modes still persist, albeit significantly in NILC map. We further probed the data for any coherent alignments across multipoles in several bins from the chosen multipole range.
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