No Arabic abstract
We study a specific correlation in spherical harmonic multipole domain for cosmic microwave background (CMB) analysis. This group of correlation between Delta l=4n, n=1,2... is caused by symmetric signal in the Galactic coordinate system. An estimator targeting such correlation therefore helps remove the localized bright point-like sources in the Galactic plane and the strong diffused component down to the CMB level. We use 3 toy models to illustrate the significance of these correlations and apply this estimator on some derived CMB maps with foreground residuals. In addition, we show that our proposed estimator significantly damp the phase correlations caused by Galactic foregrounds. This investigation provides the understanding of mode correlations caused by Galactic foregrounds, which is useful for paving the way for foreground cleaning methods for the CMB.
We present a detailed analysis on the phases of the WMAP foregrounds (synchrotron, free-free and dust emission) of the WMAP K-W bands in order to estimate the significance of the variation of the spectral indices at different components. We first extract the spectral-index varying signals by assuming that the invariant part among different frequency bands have 100% cross-correlation of phases. We then use the minimization of variance, which is normally used for extracting the CMB signals, to extract the frequency independent signals. Such a common signal in each foreground component could play a significant role for any kind of component separation methods, because the methods cannot discriminate frequency independent foregrounds and CMB.
[Abridged] We present updated estimates of Galactic foreground emission using seven years of WMAP data. Using the power spectrum of differences between multi-frequency template-cleaned maps, we find no evidence for foreground contamination outside of the updated (KQ85y7) foreground mask. We place a 15 microKelvin upper bound on rms foreground contamination in the cleaned maps used for cosmological analysis. We find no indication in the polarization data of an extra haze of hard synchrotron emission from energetic electrons near the Galactic center. We provide an updated map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) using the internal linear combination (ILC) method, updated foreground masks, and updates to point source catalogs with 62 newly detected sources. Also new are tests of the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) foreground fitting procedure against systematics in the time-stream data, and tests against the observed beam asymmetry. Within a few degrees of the Galactic plane, WMAP total intensity data show a rapidly steepening spectrum from 20-40 GHz, which may be due to emission from spinning dust grains, steepening synchrotron, or other effects. Comparisons are made to a 1-degree 408 MHz map (Haslam et al.) and the 11-degree ARCADE 2 data (Singal et al.). We find that spinning dust or steepening synchrotron models fit the combination of WMAP and 408 MHz data equally well. ARCADE data appear inconsistent with the steepening synchrotron model, and consistent with the spinning dust model, though some discrepancies remain regarding the relative strength of spinning dust emission. More high-resolution data in the 10-40 GHz range would shed much light on these issues.
Since the Galactic center is ~1000 times brighter than fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), CMB experiments must carefully account for stray Galactic pickup. We present the level of contamination due to sidelobes for the year one CMB maps produced by the WMAP observatory. For each radiometer, full 4 pi sr antenna gain patterns are determined from a combination of numerical prediction, ground-based and space-based measurements. These patterns are convolved with the WMAP year one sky maps and observatory scan pattern to generate expected sidelobe signal contamination, for both intensity and polarized microwave sky maps. Outside of the Galactic plane, we find rms values for the expected sidelobe pickup of 15, 2.1, 2.0, 0.3, 0.5 uK for K, Ka, Q, V, and W bands respectively. Except at K band, the rms polarized contamination is <<1 uK. Angular power spectra of the Galactic pickup are presented.
(Abridged) The 7-year WMAP data and improved astrophysical data rigorously test the standard cosmological model and its extensions. By combining WMAP with the latest distance measurements from BAO and H0 measurement, we determine the parameters of the simplest LCDM model. The power-law index of the primordial power spectrum is n_s=0.968+-0.012, a measurement that excludes the scale-invariant spectrum by 99.5%CL. The other parameters are also improved from the 5-year results. Notable examples of improved parameters are the total mass of neutrinos, sum(m_nu)<0.58eV, and the effective number of neutrino species, N_eff=4.34+0.86-0.88. We detect the effect of primordial helium on the temperature power spectrum and provide a new test of big bang nucleosynthesis. We detect, and show on the map for the first time, the tangential and radial polarization patterns around hot and cold spots of temperature fluctuations, an important test of physical processes at z=1090 and the dominance of adiabatic scalar fluctuations. With the 7-year TB power spectrum, the limit on a rotation of the polarization plane due to potential parity-violating effects has improved to Delta(alpha)=-1.1+-1.4(stat)+-1.5(syst) degrees. We report significant detections of the SZ effect at the locations of known clusters of galaxies. The measured SZ signal agrees well with the expected signal from the X-ray data. However, it is a factor of 0.5 to 0.7 times the predictions from universal profile of Arnaud et al., analytical models, and hydrodynamical simulations. We find, for the first time in the SZ effect, a significant difference between the cooling-flow and non-cooling-flow clusters (or relaxed and non-relaxed clusters), which can explain some of the discrepancy. This lower amplitude is consistent with the lower-than-theoretically-expected SZ power spectrum recently measured by the South Pole Telescope collaboration.