A full sky, low foreground, high resolution CMB map from WMAP

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-resolution, low-foreground, low-noise full-sky CMB map derived from WMAP data using advanced localized filtering techniques, significantly improving foreground rejection and map precision.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method employing needlet-based constrained linear combination and Wiener filtering to produce the most precise full-sky CMB map to date.

Findings

Achieved a low contamination, low noise CMB map at WMAP W channel resolution.

Produced a Wiener-filtered map with minimal integrated error.

Provided the most accurate full-sky CMB temperature map so far.

Abstract

The WMAP satellite has made available high quality maps of the sky in five frequency bands ranging from 22 to 94 GHz, with the main scientific objective of studying the anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). These maps, however, contain a mixture of emissions from various astrophysical origins, superimposed on CMB emission. The objective of the present work is to make a high resolution CMB map in which contamination by such galactic and extra-galactic foregrounds, as well as by instrumental noise, is as low as possible. The method used is an implementation of a constrained linear combination of the channels with minimum error variance, and of Wiener filtering, on a frame of spherical wavelets called needlets, allowing localised filtering in both pixel space and harmonic space. We obtain a low contamination low noise CMB map at the resolution of the WMAP W channel, which can be used for a range of scientific studies. We obtain also a Wiener-filtered version with minimal integrated error. The resulting CMB maps offer significantly better rejection of galactic foregrounds than previous CMB maps from WMAP data. They can be considered as the most precise full-sky CMB temperature maps to-date.