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In this paper, we present a foreground analysis of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe ( WMAP) 5-year data using thefastica algorithm, improving on the treatment of the WMAP 3-year data in Bottino et al. We determine coupling coefficients between the WMAP data and templates commonly used to trace the dominant foreground emissions, and use them to study the spectral properties of the diffuse emissions and subsequently to clean the data. We confirm the dependence of the values of these scaling factors on the extension of the mask used in the analysis and we again demonstrate some anomalies when the mask is adopted that remain unexplained. We also revisit the nature of the free–free spectrum with the emphasis on attempting to confirm or otherwise the spectral feature claimed in Dobler et al. and explained in terms of spinning dust emission in the warm ionized medium. With the application of different Galactic cuts, the index is always flatter than the canonical value of 2.14 except for the mask which is steeper. Irrespective of this, we cannot confirm the presence of any feature in the free–free spectrum. We experiment with a more extensive approach to the cleaning of the data, introduced in connection with the iterative application offastica. We confirm the presence of a residual foreground whose spatial distribution is concentrated along the Galactic plane, with pronounced emission near the Galactic Centre. This is consistent with the WMAP haze detected in Finkbeiner et al. Finally, we attempted to perform the same analysis on full-sky (FS) maps. The code returns good results even for those regions where the cross-talk among the components is high. However, slightly better results in terms of the possibility of reconstructing an FS CMB map are achieved with a simultaneous analysis of both the five WMAP maps and foreground templates. None the less, some residuals are still present and detected in terms of an excess in the cosmic microwave background power spectrum, on small angular scales. Therefore, a minimal mask for the brightest regions of the plane is necessary, and has been defined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We perform a blind multicomponent analysis of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe ( WMAP) 1-yr foreground-cleaned maps using Spectral Matching Independent Component Analysis ( smica). We provide a new estimate of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum as well as the amplitude of the CMB anisotropies across frequency channels. We show that the CMB anisotropies are compatible with temperature fluctuations as expected from the standard paradigm. The analysis also allows us to identify and separate a weak residual Galactic emission, present significantly in the Q band outside of the Kp2 1 mask limits, and mainly concentrated at low Galactic latitudes. We produce a map of this residual component by Wiener filtering using estimated parameters. The level of contamination of CMB data by this component is compatible with the WMAP-team estimation of foreground residual contamination. In addition, the multicomponent analysis allows us to estimate jointly the power spectrum of unresolved point-source emission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop the pseudo- Cℓ method for reconstructing the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization auto- and cross-power spectra, and estimate the pseudo- Cℓ covariance matrix for a realistic experiment on the cut sky. We calculate the full coupling equations for all six possible CMB power spectra, relating the observed pseudo- Cℓ values to the underlying all-sky Cℓ values, and test the reconstruction on both full-sky and cut-sky simulated CMB data sets. In particular we consider the reconstruction of the Cℓ from upcoming ground-based polarization experiments covering areas of a few hundred deg2 and find that the method is fast, unbiased and performs well over a wide range of multipoles from to . We then calculate the full covariance matrix between the modes of the pseudo-temperature and polarization power spectra, assuming that the underlying CMB fields are Gaussian randomly distributed. The complexity of the covariance matrix prohibits its rapid calculation, required for parameter estimation. Hence we present an approximation for the covariance matrix in terms of convolutions of the underlying power spectra. The coupling matrices in these expressions can be estimated by fitting to numerical simulations, circumventing direct and slow calculation, and further, inaccurate analytic approximations. We show that these coupling matrices are mostly independent of cosmology, and that the full covariance matrix for all six pseudo- Cℓ power spectra can be quickly and accurately calculated for any given cosmological model using this method. We compare these semi-analytic covariance matrices against simulations and find good agreement, the accuracy of which depends mainly on survey area and the range of cosmological parameters considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We presentXspect, a method to obtain estimates of the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies including analytical error bars developed for theArcheopsexperiment. Cross-power spectra are computed from a set of maps and each of them is in itself an unbiased estimate of the power spectrum as long as the detector noises are uncorrelated. Then, the cross-power spectra are combined into a final temperature power spectrum with error bars analytically derived from the cross-correlation matrix.This method presents three main useful properties: (1) no estimation of the noise power spectrum is needed; (2) complex weighting schemes including sky covering and map noise properties can be easily taken into account, and corrected for, for each input map; and (3) error bars are quickly computed analytically from the data themselves with no Monte Carlo simulations involved.Xspectalso permits the study of common fluctuations between maps from different sky surveys such as CMB, Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect or mass fluctuations from weak lensing observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Destriping methods for constructing maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies have been investigated extensively in the literature. However, their error properties have been studied in less detail. Here we present an analysis of the effects of destriping errors on CMB power spectrum estimates forPlanck-like scanning strategies. Analytic formulae are derived for certain simple scanning geometries that can be rescaled to account for different detector noise. AssumingPlanck-like low-frequency noise, the noise power spectrum is accurately white at high multipoles. Destriping errors, though dominant at lower multipoles, are small in comparison to the cosmic variance. These results show that simple destriping map-making methods should be perfectly adequate for the analysis ofPlanckdata and support the arguments given in an earlier paper in favour of applying a fast hybrid power spectrum estimator to CMB data with realistic‘1/ f’ noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]