Tessellated Mapping of Cosmic Background Radiation Correlations and Source Distributions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new celestial sphere correlation mapping method to evaluate cosmic background radiation maps, revealing insights into dust component modeling and confirming the statistical consistency of microwave background features with the ΛCDM model.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel correlation mapping technique for the full celestial sphere, enabling quality checks and non-Gaussianity analysis of cosmic maps, implemented in the GLESP software.

Findings

Detected a shift in dust component correlations suggesting complex dust models.

Confirmed that spot coincidences in microwave background and NVSS data align with ΛCDM expectations.

Demonstrated the method's effectiveness on WMAP and NVSS datasets.

Abstract

We offer a method of correlations mapping on the full celestial sphere that allows to check the quality of reconstructed maps, their non-Gaussianity and conduct experiments in various frequency ranges. The method was evaluated on the WMAP data, both on the reconstructed maps and foreground components, and on the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS) data. We detected a significant shift in the correlation data of the dust component, which can be preconditioned by a more complex dust model than the one currently in use for component separation. While studying the NVSS correlation data, we demonstrated that the statistics of the coinciding spots in the microwave background and in the NVSS survey corresponds to the one expected in the $\Lambda$CDM model. This can testify for a chance coincidence of the spots in the NVSS and WMAP data in the CMB Cold Spot region. Our method is software-implemented in the GLESP package.