Modeling Extragalactic Foregrounds and Secondaries for Unbiased Estimation of Cosmological Parameters from Primary Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy

Abstract

Using the latest physical modeling and constrained by the most recent data, we develop a phenomenological parameterized model of the contributions to intensity and polarization maps at millimeter wavelengths from external galaxies and Sunyaev-Zeldovich effects. We find such modeling to be necessary for estimation of cosmological parameters from Planck data. For example, ignoring the clustering of the infrared background would result in a bias in n_s of 7σ in the context of an eight-parameter cosmological model. We show that the simultaneous marginalization over a full foreground model can eliminate such biases, while increasing the statistical uncertainty in cosmological parameters by less than 20%. The small increases in uncertainty can be significantly reduced with the inclusion of higher-resolution ground-based data. The multi-frequency analysis we employ involves modeling 46 total power spectra and marginalization over 17 foreground parameters. We show that we can also reduce the data to a best estimate of the cosmic microwave background power spectra, with just two principal components (with constrained amplitudes) describing residual foreground contamination.

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