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Published August 10, 2012 | Published
Journal Article Open

Analysis of WMAP 7 Year Temperature Data: Astrophysics of the Galactic Haze

Abstract

We perform a joint analysis of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and Galactic emission from the WMAP 7 year temperature data. Using the Commander code, based on Gibbs sampling, we simultaneously derive the CMB and Galactic components on scales larger than 1° with improved sensitivity over previous work. We conduct a detailed study of the low-frequency Galactic foreground, focusing on the "microwave haze" emission around the Galactic center. We demonstrate improved performance in quantifying the diffuse Galactic emission when including Haslam 408 MHz data and when jointly modeling the spinning and thermal dust emission. We examine whether the hypothetical Galactic haze can be explained by a spatial variation of the synchrotron spectral index, and find that the excess of emission around the Galactic center is stable with respect to variations of the foreground model. Our results demonstrate that the new Galactic foreground component—the microwave haze—is indeed present.

Additional Information

© 2012 American Astronomical Society. Received 2011 October 24; accepted 2012 June 6; published 2012 July 26. Many of the results in this paper have been derived using the HEALPix (Górski et al. 2005) software and analysis package. We acknowledge use of the Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis (LAMBDA). Support for LAMBDA is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science. J.G.B. gratefully acknowledges support by the Institut Universitaire de France. G.D. has been supported by the Harrey L. Karp discovery award.

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