Related papers: MADCAP - The Microwave Anisotropy Dataset Computat…
This paper reports a summary of the contents contents of six hours of lectures on the CMB anisotropy experiments given at the Strasbourg NATO school on the CMB and cosmology. (Its companion paper, astro-ph/9705101 reports the lectures on…
The natural outcome of theoretical calculations of microwave background anisotropy is the angular power spectrum ${\cal C}_\ell$ as a function of multipole number $\ell$. Experimental ${\cal C}_\ell$'s are needed for direct comparison.…
This white paper addresses key challenges for the design of next-decade Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments, and for assessing their capability to extract cosmological information from CMB polarization. We focus here on the…
There is enormous potential to advance cosmology from statistical characterizations of cosmic microwave background sky maps. The angular power spectrum of the microwave anisotropy is a particularly important statistic. Existing algorithms…
We report on the first flight of the balloon-borne QMAP experiment. The experiment is designed to make a map of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy on angular scales from 0.7 to several degrees. Using the map we determine the angular…
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has mapped the full sky in five frequency bands between 23 and 94 GHz. The primary goal of the mission is to produce high-fidelity, all-sky, polarization-sensitive maps that can be used to…
The presence of astrophysical emissions in microwave observations forces us to perform component separation to extract the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) signal. However, even in the most optimistic cases, there are still strongly…
We have developed a fast, accurate and generally applicable method for inferring the power spectrum and its uncertainties from maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in the presence of inhomogeneous and correlated noise. For maps…
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…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) consists of photons that were last created about 2 months after the Big Bang, and last scattered about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The spectrum of the CMB is very close to a blackbody at 2.725 K…
A new instrument, BAM (Balloon-borne Anisotropy Measurement), designed to measure cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy at medium angular scales was flown for the first time in July of 1995. BAM is unique in that it uses a cryogenic…
The Microwave Anisotropy Probe and Planck missions will provide low noise maps of the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These maps will allow measurement of the power spectrum of the CMB with measurement noise below…
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has measured lower amplitudes for the temperature quadrupole and octopole anisotropies than expected in the best fitting (concordance) Lambda-dominated cold dark matter cosmology. Some authors…
Markov-chain Monte Carlo sampling has become a standard technique for exploring the posterior distribution of cosmological parameters constrained by observations of CMB anisotropies. Given an infinite amount of time, any MCMC sampler will…
A major problem in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy mapping, especially in a total-power mode, is the presence of low-frequency noise in the data streams. If unproperly processed, such low-frequency noise leads to striping in…
We use quadratic maximum-likelihood (QML) estimators to constrain models with Gaussian but statistically anisotropic Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fluctuations, using CMB maps with realistic sky-coverage and instrumental noise. This…
The low quadrupole of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), measured by COBE and confirmed by WMAP, has generated much discussion recently. We point out that the well-known correlation between temperature and polarization anisotropies of…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) are of great importance for cosmology. In previous work we had developed a pipeline for map-making independently of the WMAP team.…
Reliable extraction of cosmological information from observed cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps may require removal of strongly foreground contaminated regions from the analysis. In this article, we employ an artificial neural network…
Analysis of the Planck 2018 data set indicates that the statistical properties of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies are in excellent agreement with previous studies using the 2013 and 2015 data releases. In…