ANALYSIS OF SMALL-SCALE AND MEDIUM-SCALE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND MEASUREMENTS

Anisotropies in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background hav e been detected on a range of scales by several different experiments. In principle, the largest barrier to a clean interpretation of the ex perimental results is contamination by foreground sources. We address this issue by projecting out likely sources of foreground contaminatio n from seven separate small-angle and medium-angle experiments. All of the experiments are consistent so far with the simplest inflationary models; for n = 1 the experiments' combined best-fit quadrupole amplit ude is Q(rms-ps) = 18(-1)(+3) mu K, in excellent agreement with the Co smic Background Explorer two-year data.