The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: High-resolution component-separated maps across one-third of the sky

Kavli Affiliate: Toshiya Namikawa

| First 5 Authors: William R. Coulton, Mathew S. Madhavacheril, Adriaan J. Duivenvoorden, J. Colin Hill, Irene Abril-Cabezas

| Summary:

Observations of the millimeter sky contain valuable information on a number
of signals, including the blackbody cosmic microwave background (CMB), Galactic
emissions, and the Compton-$y$ distortion due to the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich
(tSZ) effect. Extracting new insight into cosmological and astrophysical
questions often requires combining multi-wavelength observations to spectrally
isolate one component. In this work, we present a new arcminute-resolution
Compton-$y$ map, which traces out the line-of-sight-integrated electron
pressure, as well as maps of the CMB in intensity and E-mode polarization,
across a third of the sky (around 13,000 sq.~deg.). We produce these through a
joint analysis of data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) Data Release
4 and 6 at frequencies of roughly 93, 148, and 225 GHz, together with data from
the textit{Planck} satellite at frequencies between 30 GHz and 545 GHz. We
present detailed verification of an internal linear combination pipeline
implemented in a needlet frame that allows us to efficiently suppress Galactic
contamination and account for spatial variations in the ACT instrument noise.
These maps provide a significant advance, in noise levels and resolution, over
the existing textit{Planck} component-separated maps and will enable a host of
science goals including studies of cluster and galaxy astrophysics, inferences
of the cosmic velocity field, primordial non-Gaussianity searches, and
gravitational lensing reconstruction of the CMB.

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