Forecasting foreground impact on cosmic microwave background measurements

Abstract

We explore the possible impact of galactic and extragalactic foregrounds on measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We find that, given our present understanding of the foregrounds, they are unlikely to qualitatively affect the ability of the MAP and Planck satellites to determine the angular power spectrum of the CMB, the key statistic for constraining cosmological parameters. Sufficiently far from the galactic plane, the only foregrounds that will affect power spectrum determination with any significance are the extragalactic ones. For MAP we find the most troublesome foregrounds are radio point sources and the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect. For Planck they are these same radio point sources and the Far Infrared Background. Prior knowledge of the statistics of the SZ component (either via theoretical calculation, or higher frequency observations of just a few percent of the sky, such as will be done by balloon-borne experiments) may significantly improve MAP's determination of the CMB power spectrum. We also explore the foreground impact on MAP and Planck polarization power spectrum measurements.

9 pages AAS LaTex with 4 included figures

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Cited by in corpus (17)

• Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies
• Foregrounds and Forecasts for the Cosmic Microwave Background
• The abundance of high-redshift objects as a probe of non-Gaussian initial conditions
• Determining Neutrino Mass from the CMB Alone
• How to measure CMB polarization power spectra without losing information
• Probing Early Structure Formation with Far-Infrared Background Correlations
• Dark Energy Tomography
• Probing Dark Energy with Supernovae: Exploiting Complementarity with the Cosmic Microwave Background
• Large-Scale Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect: Measuring Statistical Properties with Multifrequency Maps
• CMB Polarization towards Clusters as a Probe of the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe Effect
• Modeling Extragalactic Foregrounds and Secondaries for Unbiased Estimation of Cosmological Parameters From Primary CMB Anisotropy
• CMB Polarization Data and Galactic Foregrounds: Estimation of Cosmological Parameters
• The effect of bandpass uncertainties on component separation
• Applications of High Resolution High Sensitivity Observations of the CMB
• Can inflationary models of cosmic perturbations evade the secondary oscillation test?
• Foreground Predictions for the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectrum from Measurements of Faint Inverted Radio Sources at 5 GHz
• Issues and methods for CMB anisotropy data reduction