Galactic Foreground Constraints from the Python V Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy Data

• Main Authors: Pia Mukherjee, Kim Coble, Mark Dragovan, Ken Ganga, John Kovac, Bharat Ratra, Tarun Souradeep
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2003
• Subjects: South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.256.1003; http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0301581v2.pdf

We constrain Galactic foreground contamination of the Python V cosmic microwave background anisotropy data by cross correlating it with foreground contaminant emission templates. To model foreground emission we use 100 and 12 µm dust templates and two point source templates based on the PMN survey. The analysis takes account of inter-modulation correlations in 8 modulations of the data that are sensitive to a large range of angular scales and also densely sample a large area of sky. As a consequence the analysis here is highly constraining. We find little evidence for foreground contamination in a analysis of the whole data set. However, there is indication that foregrounds are present in the data from the larger-angular-scale modulations of those Python V fields that overlap the region scanned earlier by the UCSB South Pole 1994 experiment. This is an independent consistency cross-check of findings from the South Pole 1994 data. Subject headings: cosmology: observation — cosmic microwave background — diffuse