English

Cosmological parameter estimation: impact of CMB aberration

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2015-06-11 v3 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

The peculiar motion of an observer with respect to the CMB rest frame induces an apparent deflection of the observed CMB photons, {\it i.e.} aberration, and a shift in their frequency, {\it i.e.} Doppler effect. Both effects distort the temperature multipoles ama_{\ell m}'s via a mixing matrix at {\it any} \ell. The common lore when performing a CMB based cosmological parameter estimation is to consider that Doppler affects only the l=1l=1 multipole, and neglect any other corrections. In this paper we check the validity of this assumption in parameter estimation for a Planck-like angular resolution, both for a full-sky ideal experiment and also when sky cuts are included to model CMB foreground contaminations with a sky fraction similar to the Planck satellite. Assuming a simple fiducial cosmological model with five parameters, we simulated CMB temperature maps of the sky and added aberration and Doppler effects to the maps. We then analyzed with a MCMC in a Bayesian framework the maps with and without aberration and Doppler effects in order to assess the ability of reconstructing the parameters of the fiducial model. Although the correction on the power spectrum C{C_\ell} is larger than the cosmic variance at >1000\ell>1000 and potentially important, we find that the bias on the parameters is negligible for Planck.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1210.2731,
  title  = {Cosmological parameter estimation: impact of CMB aberration},
  author = {Riccardo Catena and Alessio Notari},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1210.2731},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

17 pages, 4 figures. Corrected a numerical error, main conclusion modified

R2 v1 2026-06-21T22:18:58.459Z