Effect of component separation on the temperature distribution of the cosmic microwave background

Abstract

We present a study of the effect of component separation on the recovered cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature distribution, considering Gaussian and non-Gaussian input CMB maps. In particular, the non-Gaussian maps have been generated as a mixture of a Gaussian CMB map and a cosmic strings map in different proportions. First, we extract the CMB component from simulated multifrequency Planck data (in small patches of the sky) using the maximum-entropy method (MEM), Wiener filter (WF) and a method based on the subtraction of foreground templates plus a linear combination of frequency channels (LCFC). We then apply a wavelet-based method to study the Gaussianity of the recovered CMB and compare it with the same analysis for the input map. When the original CMB map is Gaussian (and assuming that point sources have been removed), we find that neither MEM nor WF introduce non-Gaussianity in the CMB reconstruction. Regarding the LCFC, the Gaussian character is also preserved provided that the appropriate combination of frequency channels is used. On the contrary, if the input CMB map is non-Gaussian, all the studied methods produce a reconstructed CMB with lower detections of non-Gaussianity than the original map. This effect is mainly due to the presence of instrumental noise in the data, which clearly affects the quality of the reconstructions. In this case, MEM tends to produce slightly higher non-Gaussian detections in the reconstructed map than WF whereas the detections are lower for the LCFC. We have also studied the effect of point sources in the MEM reconstruction. If no attempt to remove point sources is performed, they clearly contaminate the CMB reconstruction, introducing spurious non-Gaussianity. When the brightest point sources are removed from the data using the Mexican Hat Wavelet, the Gaussian character of the CMB is preserved. However, when analysing larger regions of the sky, the variance of our estimators will be appreciably reduced and, in this case, we expect the point source residuals to introduce spurious non-Gaussianity in the CMB distribution. Therefore, a careful subtraction (or masking) of point source emission is crucial in order to be able to perform Gaussian analysis of the CMB. © 2006 RAS.