The Second Planck Catalogue of Compact Sources is a catalogue of sources detected in single-frequency maps from the full duration of the Planck mission and supersedes previo
We test the statistical isotropy and Gaussianity of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies using observations made by the Planck satellite. Our results are based mainly on the full Planck mission for temperature, but also include some pol
arization measurements. In particular, we consider the CMB anisotropy maps derived from the multi-frequency Planck data by several component-separation methods. For the temperature anisotropies, we find excellent agreement between results based on these sky maps over both a very large fraction of the sky and a broad range of angular scales, establishing that potential foreground residuals do not affect our studies. Tests of skewness, kurtosis, multi-normality, N-point functions, and Minkowski functionals indicate consistency with Gaussianity, while a power deficit at large angular scales is manifested in several ways, for example low map variance. The results of a peak statistics analysis are consistent with the expectations of a Gaussian random field. The Cold Spot is detected with several methods, including map kurtosis, peak statistics, and mean temperature profile. We thoroughly probe the large-scale dipolar power asymmetry, detecting it with several independent tests, and address the subject of a posteriori correction. Tests of directionality suggest the presence of angular clustering from large to small scales, but at a significance that is dependent on the details of the approach. We perform the first examination of polarization data, finding the morphology of stacked peaks to be consistent with the expectations of statistically isotropic simulations. Where they overlap, these results are consistent with the Planck 2013 analysis based on the nominal mission data and provide our most thorough view of the statistics of the CMB fluctuations to date.
The QUIJOTE (Q-U-I JOint Tenerife) CMB Experiment is designed to observe the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background and other Galactic and extragalactic signals at medium and large angular scales in the frequency range of 10-40 GHz. The firs
t of the two QUIJOTE telescopes and the multi-frequency (10-20 GHz) instrument have been in operation since November 2012. In 2014 a second telescope and a new instrument at 30GHz will be ready for commissioning, and an additional instrument at 40 GHz is in its final design stages. After three years of effective observations, the data obtained by these telescopes and instruments will have the required sensitivity to detect a primordial gravitational-wave component if the tensor-to-scalar ratio is larger than r = 0.05. At the moment, we have completed half of the wide Galactic survey with the multi-frequency instrument covering 18 000 square degrees of the Northern hemisphere. When we finish this survey in early 2014, we shall have reached approximately 14{mu}K per one degree beam at 11, 13, 17 and 19 GHz, in both Q and U.
