Determining thermal dust emission from Planck HFI data using a sparse, parametric technique

 

Authors: M.O. Irfan, J.Bobin, M-A.Miville-Deschenes, I.Grenier 
Journal: A&A
Year: 2018
Download: ADS | arXiv


Abstract

Context: The Planck data releases have provided the community with sub-millimetre and radio observations of the full-sky at unprecedented resolutions. We make use of the Planck 353, 545 and 857 GHz maps alongside the IRAS 3000 GHz map. These maps contain information on the cosmic microwave background (CMB), cosmic infrared background (CIB), extragalactic point sources and diffuse thermal dust emission. Aims: We aim to determine the modified black body (MBB) model parameters of thermal dust emission in total intensity and produce all sky maps of pure thermal dust, having separated this Galactic component from the CMB and CIB. Methods: This separation is completed using a new, sparsity-based, parametric method which we refer to as premise. The method comprises of three main stages: 1) filtering of the raw data to reduce the effect of the CIB on the MBB fit. 2) fitting an MBB model to the filtered data across super-pixels of various sizes determined by the algorithm itself and 3) refining these super-pixel estimates into full resolution maps of the MBB parameters. Results: We present our maps of MBB temperature, spectral index and optical depth at 5 arcmin resolution and compare our estimates to those of GNILC as well as the two-step MBB fit presented by the Planck collaboration in 2013. Conclusions: By exploiting sparsity we avoid the need for smoothing, enabling us to produce the first full resolution MBB parameter maps from intensity measurements of thermal dust emission.We consider the premise parameter estimates to be competitive with the existing state-of-the-art solutions, outperforming these methods within low signal-to-noise regions as we account for the CIB without removing thermal dust emission through over-smoothing.

Sparse estimation of model-based diffuse thermal dust emission

 

Authors: M.O. Irfan, J.Bobin 
Journal: MNRAS
Year: 2017
Download: ADS | arXiv


Abstract

Component separation for the Planck HFI data is primarily concerned with the estimation of thermal dust emission, which requires the separation of thermal dust from the cosmic infrared background (CIB). For that purpose, current estimation methods rely on filtering techniques to decouple thermal dust emission from CIB anisotropies, which tend to yield a smooth, low- resolution, estimation of the dust emission. In this paper we present a new parameter estimation method, premise: Parameter Recovery Exploiting Model Informed Sparse Estimates. This method exploits the sparse nature of thermal dust emission to calculate all-sky maps of thermal dust temperature, spectral index and optical depth at 353 GHz. premise is evaluated and validated on full-sky simulated data. We find the percentage difference between the premise results and the true values to be 2.8, 5.7 and 7.2 per cent at the 1 sigma level across the full sky for thermal dust temperature, spectral index and optical depth at 353 GHz, respectively. Comparison between premise and a GNILC-like method over selected regions of our sky simulation reveals that both methods perform comparably within high signal-to-noise regions. However outside of the Galactic plane premise is seen to outperform the GNILC-like method with increasing success as the signal-to-noise ratio worsens.