PRODUCING MEGAPIXEL COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND MAPS FROM DIFFERENTIAL RADIOMETER DATA

Citation
El. Wright et al., PRODUCING MEGAPIXEL COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND MAPS FROM DIFFERENTIAL RADIOMETER DATA, The Astrophysical journal, 458(2), 1996, pp. 53
Citations number
4
Categorie Soggetti
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Journal title
ISSN journal
0004637X
Volume
458
Issue
2
Year of publication
1996
Part
2
Database
ISI
SICI code
0004-637X(1996)458:2<53:PMCMBM>2.0.ZU;2-F
Abstract
A major goal of cosmology is to obtain sensitive, high-resolution maps of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy. Such maps, as would be produced by the recently proposed Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP), w ill contain a wealth of primary information about conditions in the ea rly universe. To mitigate Systematic effects when observing the microw ave background, it is desirable for the raw data to be collected in di fferential form: as a set of temperature differences between points in the sky. However, the production of large (megapixel) maps from a set of temperature differences is a potentially severe computational chal lenge. We present a new technique for producing maps from differential radiometer data that has a computational cost that grows in the slowe st possible way with increasing angular resolution and number of map p ixels. The required CPU time is proportional to the number of differen tial data points, and the required random-access memory is proportiona l to the number of map pixels. We test our technique, and demonstrate its feasibility, by simulating 1 yr of a spaceborne anisotropy mission .