New insights into foreground analysis of the WMAP five-year data using FASTICA

TL;DR

This paper applies the FASTICA algorithm to WMAP 5-year data to analyze foreground components, confirm the absence of certain spectral features, and improve full-sky CMB map reconstruction, revealing residual foregrounds.

Contribution

It introduces an improved foreground cleaning method using FASTICA on WMAP 5-year data and assesses its effectiveness for full-sky CMB map reconstruction.

Findings

No confirmation of the claimed free-free spectral feature.

Residual foregrounds are concentrated along the Galactic plane.

Full-sky analysis benefits from combined WMAP and foreground templates.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a foreground analysis of the WMAP 5-year data using the FASTICA algorithm, improving on the treatment of the WMAP 3-year data in Bottino et al 2008. We revisit the nature of the free-free spectrum with the emphasis on attempting to confirm or otherwise the spectral feature claimed in Dobbler et al 2008b and explained in terms of spinning dust emission in the warm ionised medium. With the application of different Galactic cuts, the index is always flatter than the canonical value of 2.14 except for the Kp0 mask which is steeper. Irrespective of this, we can not 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 of FASTICA. We confirm the presence of a residual foreground whose spatial distribution is concentrated along the Galactic plane, with pronounced emission near the Galactic center. This is consistent with the WMAP haze detected in Finkbeiner 2004. Finally, we attempted to perform the same analysis on full-sky 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 a full-sky CMB map, are achieved with a simultaneous analysis of both the five WMAP maps and foreground templates. Nonetheless, some residuals are still present and detected in terms of an excess in the CMB power spectrum, on small angular scales. Therefore, a minimal mask for the brightest regions of the plane is necessary, and has been defined.