We combine Planck High Frequency Instrument data at 857, 545, 353 and 217 GHz with data from Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), Spitzer, IRAS and Herschel to investigate the properties of a ...well-defined, flux-limited sample of local star-forming galaxies. A 545 GHz flux density limit was chosen so that the sample is 80 per cent complete at this frequency, and the resulting sample contains a total of 234 local, star-forming galaxies. We investigate the dust emission and star formation properties of the sample via various models and calculate the local dust mass function. Although single-component-modified blackbodies fit the dust emission longward of 80 μm very well, with a median β = 1.83, the known degeneracy between dust temperature and β also means that the spectral energy distributions are very well described by a dust component with dust emissivity index fixed at β = 2 and temperature in the range 10-25 K. Although a second, warmer dust component is required to fit shorter wavelength data, and contributes approximately a third of the total infrared emission, its mass is negligible. No evidence is found for a very cold (6-10 K) dust component. The temperature of the cold dust component is strongly influenced by the ratio of the star formation rate to the total dust mass. This implies, contrary to what is often assumed, that a significant fraction of even the emission from ∼20 K dust is powered by ongoing star formation, whether or not the dust itself is associated with star-forming clouds or 'cirrus'. There is statistical evidence of a free-free contribution to the 217 GHz flux densities of 20 per cent. We find a median dust-to-stellar mass ratio of 0.0046; and that this ratio is anticorrelated with galaxy mass. There is good correlation between dust mass and atomic gas mass (median M
d
M
HI
= 0.022), suggesting that galaxies that have more dust (higher values of M
d/M
*) have more interstellar medium in general. Our derived dust mass function implies a mean dust mass density of the local Universe (for dust within galaxies), of 7.0 ± 1.4 × 105 M Mpc−3, significantly greater than that found in the most recent estimate using Herschel data.
ABSTRACT Atmosphere is one of the most important noise sources for ground-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. By increasing optical loading on the detectors, it amplifies their ...effective noise, while its fluctuations introduce spatial and temporal correlations between detected signals. We present a physically motivated 3D-model of the atmosphere total intensity emission in the millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths. We derive a new analytical estimate for the correlation between detectors time-ordered data as a function of the instrument and survey design, as well as several atmospheric parameters such as wind, relative humidity, temperature and turbulence characteristics. Using an original numerical computation, we examine the effect of each physical parameter on the correlations in the time series of a given experiment. We then use a parametric-likelihood approach to validate the modeling and estimate atmosphere parameters from the polarbear-i project first season data set. We derive a new 1.0% upper limit on the linear polarization fraction of atmospheric emission. We also compare our results to previous studies and weather station measurements. The proposed model can be used for realistic simulations of future ground-based CMB observations.
We propose a method for CMB component separation based on standard Bayesian parameter estimation techniques. We assume a parametric spectral model for each signal component and fit the corresponding ...parameters pixel by pixel in a two-stage process. First we fit for the full parameter set (e.g., component amplitudes and spectral indices) in low-resolution and high signal-to-noise ratio maps using MCMC, obtaining both best-fit values for each parameter and the associated uncertainty. The goodness of fit is approximated by a j super(2) statistic. Then we fix all nonlinear parameters at their low-resolution best-fit values and solve analytically for high-resolution component amplitude maps. This likelihood approach has many advantages: the fitted model may be chosen freely, and the method is therefore completely general; all assumptions are transparent; no restrictions on spatial variations of foreground properties are imposed; the results may be monitored by goodness-of-fit tests; and, most importantly, we obtain reliable error estimates on all estimated quantities. We apply the method to simulated Planck satellite and 6 year WMAP data based on realistic models and show that separation at the microkelvin level is indeed possible in these cases. We also outline how the foreground uncertainties may be rigorously propagated through to the CMB power spectrum and cosmological parameters using a Gibbs sampling technique.
We investigate the influence of dark energy on structure formation, within five different cosmological models, namely a concordance Λ cold dark matter model, two models with dynamical dark energy, ...viewed as a quintessence scalar field using a Ratra and Peebles (RP) and a supergravity (SUGRA) potential form, and two extended quintessence models (EQp and EQn), where the quintessence scalar field interacts non-minimally with gravity (scalar-tensor theories). We adopted for all models the normalization of the matter power spectrum σ8 to match the cosmic microwave background data. In the models with dynamical dark energy and quintessence, we describe the equation of state with w
0≈−0.9, still within the range allowed by observations. For each model, we have performed hydrodynamical simulations in a cosmological box of (300 Mpc h
−1)3 including baryons and allowing for cooling and star formation. The contemporary presence of evolving dark energy and baryon physics allows us to investigate the interplay between the different background cosmology and the evolution of the luminous matter. Since cluster baryon fraction can be used to constrain other cosmological parameters such as Ωm, we also analyse how dark energy influences the baryon content of galaxy clusters. We find that in models with dynamical dark energy, the evolving cosmological background leads to different star formation rates and different formation histories of galaxy clusters, but the baryon physics is not affected in a relevant way. We investigate several proxies of the cluster mass function based on X-ray observables like temperature, luminosity, M
gas and Y
gas. We conclude that the X-ray temperature and M
gas functions are better diagnostic to disentangle the growth of structures among different dark energy models. We also evaluate the cosmological volumes needed to distinguish the dark energy models here investigated using the cluster number counts (in terms of the mass function and the X-ray luminosity and temperature functions). Relaxed, massive clusters, when studied in regions sufficiently far from the centre, are built up in a very similar way despite the different dark energy models here considered. We confirm that the overall baryon fraction is almost independent of the dark energy models at a few per cent level. The same is true for the gas fraction. This evidence reinforces the use of galaxy clusters as cosmological probe of the matter and energy content of the Universe.
We study the impact of the spectral dependence of the linear polarization rotation induced by an achromatic half-wave plate on measurements of cosmic microwave background polarization in the presence ...of astrophysical foregrounds. We focus on the systematic effects induced on the measurement of inflationary gravitational waves by uncertainties in the polarization and spectral index of Galactic dust. We find that for the experimental configuration and noise levels of the balloon-borne EBEX experiment, which has three frequency bands centered at 150, 250, and 410 GHz, a crude dust subtraction process mitigates systematic effects to below detectable levels for 10% polarized dust and tensor-to-scalar ratio of as low as r = 0.01. We also study the impact of uncertainties in the spectral response of the instrument. With a top-hat model of the spectral response for each band, characterized by band center and bandwidth, and with the same crude dust subtraction process, we find that these parameters need to be determined to within 1 and 0.8 GHz at 150 GHz; 9 and 2.0 GHz at 250 GHz; and 20 and 14 GHz at 410 GHz, respectively. The approach presented in this paper is applicable to other optical elements that exhibit polarization rotation as a function of frequency.
We report a 4.8 measurement of the cross-correlation signal between the cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing convergence reconstructed from measurements of the CMB polarization made by the ...Polarbear experiment and the infrared-selected galaxies of the Herschel-ATLAS survey. This is the first measurement of its kind. We infer a best-fit galaxy bias of , corresponding to a host halo mass of at an effective redshift of z ∼ 2 from the cross-correlation power spectrum. Residual uncertainties in the redshift distribution of the submillimeter galaxies are subdominant with respect to the statistical precision. We perform a suite of systematic tests, finding that instrumental and astrophysical contaminations are small compared to the statistical error. This cross-correlation measurement only relies on CMB polarization information that, differently from CMB temperature maps, is less contaminated by galactic and extragalactic foregrounds, providing a clearer view of the projected matter distribution. This result demonstrates the feasibility and robustness of this approach for future high-sensitivity CMB polarization experiments.