Improved CMB Map from WMAP Data

Abstract

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps published by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) team are found to be inconsistent with the differential time-ordered data (TOD), from which the maps are reconstructed. The inconsistency indicates that there is a serious problem in the map making routine of the WMAP team, and it is necessary to reprocess the WMAP data. We develop a self-consistent software package of map-making and power spectrum estimation independently of the WMAP team. Our software passes a variety of tests. New CMB maps are then reconstructed, which are significantly different from the official WMAP maps. In the new maps, the inconsistency disappeared, along with the hitherto unexplained high level alignment between the CMB quadrupole and octopole components detected in released WMAP maps. An improved CMB cross-power spectrum is then derived from the new maps which better agrees with that of BOOMRANG. Two important results are hence obtained: the CMB quadrupole drops to nearly zero, and the power in multiple moment range between 200 and 675 decreases on average by about 13%, causing the best-fit cosmological parameters to change considerably, e.g., the total matter density increases from 0.26 up to 0.32 and the dark energy density decreases from 0.74 down to 0.68. These new parameters match with improved accuracy those of other independent experiments. Our results indicate that there is still room for significant revision in the cosmological model parameters.

Submitted to MNRAS. In the revised version (v3) we make foreground reduction with the same technique WMAP team used and add the results of reconstructing the sky maps with the WMAP default flagging and our software

References in corpus (4)

• Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Data Processing, Sky Maps, and Basic Results
• Observation number correlation in WMAP data
• Systematic Distortion in Cosmic Microwave Background Maps
• Significant foreground unrelated non-acoustic anisotropy on the one degree scale in WMAP 5-year observations

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• Dark Energy Cosmology with the Alternative Cosmic Microwave Background Data
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• Normalization of the Matter Power Spectrum via the Ellipticity Function of Giant Galaxy Voids from SDSS DR5
• Direct measurement of evolving dark energy density and super-accelerating expansion of the universe
• Galactic Plane image sharpness as a check on cosmic microwave background mapmaking