335 research outputs found
Some Good Reasons to Use Matched Filters for the Detection of Point Sources in CMB Maps
In this draft we comment on the results concerning the performances of
matched filters, scale adaptive filters and Mexican hat wavelet that recently
appeared in literature in the context of point source detection in Cosmic
Microwave Background maps. In particular, we show that, contrary to what has
been claimed, the use of the matched filters still appear to be the most
reliable and efficient method to disantangle point sources from the
backgrounds, even when using detection criterion that, differently from the
classic thresholding rule, takes into account not only the height of
the peaks in the signal corresponding to the candidate sources but also their
curvature.Comment: Replacement after submission to A&A and referee's comments. Astronomy
and Astrophysics, in press, JNL/2003/473
Detection of new point-sources in WMAP Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) maps at high Galactic latitude. A new technique to extract point sources from CMB maps
In experimental microwave maps, point-sources can strongly affect the
estimation of the power-spectrum and/or the test of Gaussianity of the Cosmic
Microwave Background (CMB) component. As a consequence, their removal from the
sky maps represents a critical step in the analysis of the CMB data. Before
removing a source, however, it is necessary to detect it and source extraction
consists of a delicate preliminary operation. In the literature, various
techniques have been presented to detect point-sources in the sky maps. The
most sophisticated ones exploit the multi-frequency nature of the observations
that is typical of the CMB experiments. These techniques have "optimal"
theoretical properties and, at least in principle, are capable of remarkable
performances. Actually, they are rather difficult to use and this deteriorates
the quality of the obtainable results. In this paper, we present a new
technique, the "weighted matched filter" (WMF), that is quite simple to use and
hence more robust in practical applications. Such technique shows particular
efficiency in the detection of sources whose spectra have a slope different
from zero. We apply this method to three Southern Hemisphere sky regions - each
with an area of 400 square degrees - of the seven years Wilkinson Microwave
Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) maps and compare the resulting sources with those of
the two seven-year WMAP point-sources catalogues. In these selected regions we
find seven additional sources not previously listed in WMAP catalogues and
discuss their most likely identification and spectral properties.Comment: Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2011, in pres
Unevenly-sampled signals: a general formalism of the Lomb-Scargle periodogram
The periodogram is a popular tool that tests whether a signal consists only
of noise or if it also includes other components. The main issue of this method
is to define a critical detection threshold that allows identification of a
component other than noise, when a peak in the periodogram exceeds it. In the
case of signals sampled on a regular time grid, determination of such a
threshold is relatively simple. When the sampling is uneven, however, things
are more complicated. The most popular solution in this case is to use the
"Lomb-Scargle" periodogram, but this method can be used only when the noise is
the realization of a zero-mean, white (i.e. flat-spectrum) random process. In
this paper, we present a general formalism based on matrix algebra, which
permits analysis of the statistical properties of a periodogram independently
of the characteristics of noise (e.g. colored and/or non-stationary), as well
as the characteristics of sampling.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, Astronomy and Astrophysics, in pres
An approach for the detection of point-sources in very high resolution microwave maps
This paper deals with the detection problem of extragalactic point-sources in
multi-frequency, microwave sky maps that will be obtainable in future cosmic
microwave background radiation (CMB) experiments with instruments capable of
very high spatial resolution. With spatial resolutions that can be of order of
0.1-1.0 arcsec or better, the extragalactic point-sources will appear isolated.
The same holds also for the compact structures due to the Sunyaev-Zeldovich
(SZ) effect (both thermal and kinetic). This situation is different from the
maps obtainable with instruments as WMAP or PLANCK where, because of the
smaller spatial resolution (approximately 5-30 arcmin), the point-sources and
the compact structures due to the SZ effect form a uniform noisy background
(the "confusion noise"). Hence, the point-source detection techniques developed
in the past are based on the assumption that all the emissions that contribute
to the microwave background can be modeled with homogeneous and isotropic
(often Gaussian) random fields and make use of the corresponding spatial
power-spectra. In the case of very high resolution observations such an
assumption cannot be adopted since it still holds only for the CMB. Here, we
propose an approach based on the assumption that the diffuse emissions that
contribute to the microwave background can be locally approximated by
two-dimensional low order polynomials. In particular, two sets of numerical
techniques are presented containing two different algorithms each. The
performance of the algorithms is tested with numerical experiments that mimic
the physical scenario expected for high Galactic latitude observations with the
Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA).Comment: Accepted for publication on "Astronomy & Astrophysics". arXiv admin
note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1206.4536 Replaced version is the
accepted one and published in A&
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