Maps of the Magellanic Clouds from Combined South Pole Telescope and Planck Data
Abstract
We present maps of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds from combined South Pole Telescope (SPT) and Planck data. The Planck satellite observes in nine bands, while the SPT data used in this work were taken with the three-band SPT-SZ camera, The SPT-SZ bands correspond closely to three of the nine Planck bands, namely those centered at 1.4, 2.1, and 3.0 mm. The angular resolution of the Planck data ranges from 5 to 10 arcmin, while the SPT resolution ranges from 1.0 to 1.7 arcmin. The combined maps take advantage of the high resolution of the SPT data and the long-timescale stability of the space-based Planck observations to deliver robust brightness measurements on scales from the size of the maps down to ~1 arcmin. In each band, we first calibrate and color-correct the SPT data to match the Planck data, then we use noise estimates from each instrument and knowledge of each instrument's beam to make the inverse-variance-weighted combination of the two instruments' data as a function of angular scale. We create maps assuming a range of underlying emission spectra and at a range of final resolutions. We perform several consistency tests on the combined maps and estimate the expected noise in measurements of features in the maps. We compare maps from this work to maps from the Herschel HERITAGE survey, finding general consistency between the datasets. All data products described in this paper are available for download from the NASA Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis server.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1605.00966,
title = {Maps of the Magellanic Clouds from Combined South Pole Telescope and Planck Data},
author = {T. M. Crawford and R. Chown and G. P. Holder and K. A. Aird and B. A. Benson and L. E. Bleem and J. E. Carlstrom and C. L. Chang and H-M. Cho and A. T. Crites and T. de Haan and M. A. Dobbs and E. M. George and N. W. Halverson and N. L. Harrington and W. L. Holzapfel and Z. Hou and J. D. Hrubes and R. Keisler and L. Knox and A. T. Lee and E. M. Leitch and D. Luong-Van and D. P. Marrone and J. J. McMahon and S. S. Meyer and L. M. Mocanu and J. J. Mohr and T. Natoli and S. Padin and C. Pryke and C. L. Reichardt and J. E. Ruhl and J. T. Sayre and K. K. Schaffer and E. Shirokoff and Z. Staniszewski and A. A. Stark and K. T. Story and K. Vanderlinde and J. D. Vieira and R. Williamson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.00966},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
25 pages, 15 figures. Published in ApJS. All data products described in this paper are available for download at http://pole.uchicago.edu/public/data/maps/magclouds and from the NASA LAMBDA server