High resolution foreground cleaned CMB map from WMAP

By Max Tegmark, A. D. Oliveira-Costa, A. Hamilton. 2003

495 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We perform an independent foreground analysis of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) maps to produce a cleaned cosmic microwave background (CMB) map (available online) useful for cross-correlation with, e.g., galaxy and x-ray maps. We use a variant of the Tegmark-Efstathiou technique that assumes that the CMB has a blackbody spectrum, but is otherwise completely blind, making no assumptions about the CMB power spectrum, the foregrounds, WMAP detector noise or external templates. Compared with the foreground-cleaned internal linear combination map produced by the WMAP team, our map has the advantage of containing less non-CMB power (from foregrounds and detector noise) outside the Galactic plane. The difference is most important on the angular scale of the first acoustic peak and below, since our cleaned map is at the highest ${(12.6}^{\ensuremath{'}})$ rather than lowest ${(49.2}^{\ensuremath{'}})$ WMAP resolution. We also produce a Wiener filtered CMB map, representing our best guess as to what the CMB sky actually looks like, as well as CMB-free maps at the five WMAP frequencies useful for foreground studies. We argue that our CMB map is clean enough that the lowest multipoles can be measured without any galaxy cut, and obtain a quadrupole value that is slightly less low than that from the cut-sky WMAP team analysis. This can be understood from a map of the CMB quadrupole, which shows much of its power falling within the Galaxy cut region, seemingly coincidentally. Intriguingly, both the quadrupole and the octopole are seen to have power suppressed along a particular spatial axis, which lines up between the two, roughly towards $(l,b)\ensuremath{\sim}(\ensuremath{-}110\ifmmode^\circ\else\textdegree\fi{},60\ifmmode^\circ\else\textdegree\fi{})$ in Virgo.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/217c9cd334a9d43b263009d16b53adb5ea7f25f2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

A model of diffuse Galactic radio emission from 10 MHz to 100 GHz (2008, methodology): “They were defined in (Tegmark et al. 2003) by computing the four differences of WMAP maps at neighbouring frequencies (to subtract out the CMB), computing the largest absolute value at each pixel, and making a contour plot of the resulting ‘junk map’.”
A full sky, low foreground, high resolution CMB map from WMAP (2008, methodology): “Hinshaw et al. (2007) and Tegmark et al. (2003) divide the sky into several independent regions, perform component separation independently in these regions, and then make a composite map by stitching together these independent solutions.”
21 cm Tomography with Foregrounds (2005, background): “This multifrequency approach is more powerful here than for typical CMB applications (Bennett et al. 2003; Tegmark 1998; Tegmark et al. 2003) because of the potentially much better spectral resolution and the dramatically oscillating 21 cm signal compared with smooth foregrounds along the frequency…”
Testing for Non-Gaussianity in the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe Data: Minkowski Functionals and the Length of the Skeleton (2004, methodology): “…reestimate the northern hemisphere statistics (using the Kp0 mask), this time for a set of seven different maps: (1) the coadded WMAP map, (2) the Tegmark et al. (2003) cleaned map, (3) theWMAP Internal Linear Combination (ILC) map (Bennett et al. 2003b), (4)–(6) the averaged Q, V, and W bands,…”
On Foreground Removal from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe Data by an Internal Linear Combination Method: Limitations and Implications (2004, methodology): “It should be noted that Tegmark et al. (2003) have applied a generalization of the ILC method to the WMAP data.”
Extended Anomalous Foreground Emission in the WMAP Three-Year Data (2007, methodology): “…easy to show that, if the columns of P are linearly independent as they are in our case, P+ = [P T P ]−1P T , making our technique equivalent to other χ2 minimization techniques (e.g. Tegmark et al. 2003; de Oliveira-Costa & Tegmark 2006). completely decouple the bands from each other in our fits.”
Describing the platycosms (2003, background): “ as well as mathematicians, and indeed there are some recent astronomical observations that suggest that the physical universe might actually be a platycosm! (see for example [E], [HS], [NYT], [Spe], [TOH], [URLW]). We believe that these 10 manifolds should be more widely known. Accordingly, our pri”
Non-Gaussian signatures in the temperature fluctuation observed by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (2003, methodology): “Tegmark et al. (2003) also show that the foregrounds in their TCM are subdominant in all but the very innermost Galactic plane, for 100.”
Extragalactic Radio Sources and the WMAP Cold Spot (2007, result): “3) Similar results are found when using totally independent methods to model and subtract out the foreground emission (Cruz et al. 2006), namely the combined and foreground cleaned Q-V-W map (Bennett et al. 2003) and the weighted internal linear combination analysis (Tegmark et al. 2003).”
Mapping extreme-scale alignments of quasar polarization vectors (2005, background): “The distribution of polarization angles is weakly coherently oriented with PHP = 2 × 10−2 and a preferred direction of 37◦ in that coordinate system. rection (e.g. Tegmark et al. 2003).”
The non‐Gaussian cold spot in Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe: significance, morphology and foreground contribution (2006, methodology): “Tegmark et al. (2003) derived also a Wiener filtered map.”