4,878 research outputs found
The Planck-LFI instrument: analysis of the 1/f noise and implications for the scanning strategy
We study the impact of the 1/f noise on the PLANCK Low Frequency Instrument
(LFI) osbervations (Mandolesi et al 1998) and describe a simple method for
removing striping effects from the maps for a number of different scanning
stategies. A configuration with an angle between telescope optical axis and
spin-axis just less than 90 degrees (namely 85 degress) shows good destriping
efficiency for all receivers in the focal plane, with residual noise
degradation < 1-2 %. In this configuration, the full sky coverage can be
achieved for each channel separately with a 5 degrees spin-axis precession to
maintain a constant solar aspect angle.Comment: submitted to Astronomy and Astrophysics, 12 pages, 15 PostSript
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Testing for Non-Gaussianity in the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe Data: Minkowski Functionals and the Length of the Skeleton
The three Minkowski functionals and the recently defined length of the
skeleton are estimated for the co-added first-year Wilkinson Microwave
Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data and compared with 5000 Monte Carlo simulations,
based on Gaussian fluctuations with the a-priori best-fit running-index power
spectrum and WMAP-like beam and noise properties. Several power
spectrum-dependent quantities, such as the number of stationary points, the
total length of the skeleton, and a spectral parameter, gamma, are also
estimated. While the area and length Minkowski functionals and the length of
the skeleton show no evidence for departures from the Gaussian hypothesis, the
northern hemisphere genus has a chi^2 that is large at the 95% level for all
scales. For the particular smoothing scale of 3.40 degrees FWHM it is larger
than that found in 99.5% of the simulations. In addition, the WMAP genus for
negative thresholds in the northern hemisphere has an amplitude that is larger
than in the simulations with a significance of more than 3 sigma. On the
smallest angular scales considered, the number of extrema in the WMAP data is
high at the 3 sigma level. However, this can probably be attributed to the
effect of point sources. Finally, the spectral parameter gamma is high at the
99% level in the northern Galactic hemisphere, while perfectly acceptable in
the southern hemisphere. The results provide strong evidence for the presence
of both non-Gaussian behavior and an unexpected power asymmetry between the
northern and southern hemispheres in the WMAP data.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in Ap
Estimates of multipolar coefficients to search for cosmic ray anisotropies with non-uniform or partial sky coverage
We study the possibility to extract the multipolar moments of an underlying
distribution from a set of cosmic rays observed with non-uniform or even
partial sky coverage. We show that if the degree is assumed to be upper bounded
by , each multipolar moment can be recovered whatever the coverage, but with
a variance increasing exponentially with the bound if the coverage is zero
somewhere. Despite this limitation, we show the possibility to test predictions
of a model without any assumption on by building an estimate of the
covariance matrix seen through the exposure function.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure
Bayesian analysis of the low-resolution polarized 3-year WMAP sky maps
We apply a previously developed Gibbs sampling framework to the foreground
corrected 3-yr WMAP polarization data and compute the power spectrum and
residual foreground template amplitude posterior distributions. We first
analyze the co-added Q- and V-band data, and compare our results to the
likelihood code published by the WMAP team. We find good agreement, and thus
verify the numerics and data processing steps of both approaches. However, we
also analyze the Q- and V-bands separately, allowing for non-zero EB
cross-correlations and including two individual foreground template amplitudes
tracing synchrotron and dust emission. In these analyses, we find tentative
evidence of systematics: The foreground tracers correlate with each of the Q-
and V-band sky maps individually, although not with the co-added QV map; there
is a noticeable negative EB cross-correlation at l <~ 16 in the V-band map; and
finally, when relaxing the constraints on EB and BB, noticeable differences are
observed between the marginalized band powers in the Q- and V-bands. Further
studies of these features are imperative, given the importance of the low-l EE
spectrum on the optical depth of reionization tau and the spectral index of
scalar perturbations n_s.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, submitted to ApJ
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