article · Physical review. D/Physical review. D.
Observations of the millimetre sky hold critical information regarding the cosmic microwave background, Galactic emissions, and thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich distortions. To isolate these distinct signals, multiwavelength data must be combined effectively. New high-resolution maps have been produced across approximately 13,000 square degrees, representing one third of the sky. These products include an arc-minute-resolution Compton-y map tracing electron pressure, alongside maps of cosmic microwave background intensity and E-mode polarisation. The maps were constructed through a joint analysis combining data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the Planck satellite across multiple frequencies. A specialised internal linear combination pipeline implemented in a needlet frame was verified to suppress Galactic foreground contamination and manage spatial noise variations. The resulting datasets achieve substantial improvements in resolution and noise reduction compared to previous space-based releases, enabling detailed cosmological studies.
Understanding the early universe and the formation of cosmic structures requires clear, detailed views of ancient light. By combining ground-based and satellite telescope data, these maps filter out foreground interference with unprecedented clarity. They provide astrophysicists with sharper tools to investigate how galaxies evolve, measure cosmic expansion, and test fundamental physics governing the universe.
The abstract does not indicate an application pathway, as the research is focused entirely on fundamental astrophysics datasets and methods for academic research.
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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 multiwavelength observations to spectrally isolate one component. In this work, we present a new arc-minute-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 $13,000\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{deg}}^{2}$). 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 Planck satellite at frequencies between 30 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 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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DOI: 10.1103/physrevd.109.063530
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