The Quest for Microwave Foreground X

de Oliveira-Costa, Angélica; Tegmark, Max; Davies, R. D.; Gutiérrez, Carlos M.; Lasenby, A. N.; Rebolo, R.; Watson, R. A.
Bibliographical reference

The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 606, Issue 2, pp. L89-L92.

Advertised on:
5
2004
Number of authors
7
IAC number of authors
3
Citations
95
Refereed citations
80
Description
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) team has produced a foreground map that can account for most of the low-frequency Galactic microwave emission in the WMAP maps, tentatively interpreting it as synchrotron emission. Finkbeiner and collaborators have challenged these conclusions, arguing that the WMAP team's ``synchrotron'' template is in fact dominated not by synchrotron radiation but by some dust-related Galactic emission process, perhaps spinning dust grains, making dramatically different predictions for its behavior at lower frequencies. By cross-correlating this synchrotron template with 10 and 15 GHz cosmic microwave background observations, we find that its spectrum turns over in a manner consistent with spinning dust emission, falling about an order of magnitude below what the synchrotron interpretation would predict.