Extragalactic CO emission lines in the CMB experiments: a forgotten signal and a foreground

TL;DR

This paper investigates extragalactic CO emission lines in CMB data, revealing they are a significant foreground that can affect measurements of the kSZ power spectrum and other cosmological signals.

Contribution

It demonstrates that CO line emissions contribute notably to CMB maps and must be considered in analyses to avoid biasing cosmological measurements.

Findings

CO lines have a similar contribution to CIB-tSZ correlations.

CO emissions can impact the detection of the kSZ power spectrum.

Cross-correlation with CIB offers a new way to measure CO power spectrum.

Abstract

High resolution cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments have allowed us to precisely measure the CMB temperature power spectrum down to very small scales (multipole $\ell \sim 3000$). Such measurements at multiple frequencies enable separating the primary CMB anisotropies with other signals like CMB lensing, thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects (tSZ and kSZ), and cosmic infrared background (CIB). In this paper, we explore another signal of interest at these frequencies that should be present in the CMB maps: extragalactic CO molecular rotational line emissions, which are the most widely used tracers of molecular gas in the line intensity mapping experiments. Using the SIDES simulations adopted for top hat bandpasses at 150 and 220 GHz, we show that the cross-correlation of the CIB with CO lines has a contribution similar to the CIB-tSZ correlation and the kSZ power, thereby contributing a non-negligible amount to the total power at these scales. This signal, therefore, may significantly impact the recently reported $\geq 3\sigma$ detection of the kSZ power spectrum from the South Pole Telescope (SPT) collaboration, as the contribution of the CO lines is not considered in such analyses. Our results also provide a new way of measuring the CO power spectrum in cross-correlation with the CIB. Finally, these results show that the CO emissions present in the CMB maps will have to be accounted for in all the CMB auto-power spectrum and cross-correlation studies involving a LSS tracer.