English

Foreground separation methods for satellite observations of the cosmic microwave background

Astrophysics 2009-10-30 v1

Abstract

A maximum entropy method (MEM) is presented for separating the emission due to different foreground components from simulated satellite observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). In particular, the method is applied to simulated observations by the proposed Planck Surveyor satellite. The simulations, performed by Bouchet and Gispert (1998), include emission from the CMBR, the kinetic and thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effects from galaxy clusters, as well as Galactic dust, free-free and synchrotron emission. We find that the MEM technique performs well and produces faithful reconstructions of the main input components. The method is also compared with traditional Wiener filtering and is shown to produce consistently better results, particularly in the recovery of the thermal SZ effect.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9806387,
  title  = {Foreground separation methods for satellite observations of the cosmic microwave background},
  author = {MP Hobson and AW Jones and AN Lasenby and FR Bouchet},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9806387},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

31 pages, 19 figures (bitmapped), accpeted for publication in MNRAS