This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This research project involves a comprehensive study of galactic foreground emission for removal from sensitive maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), necessary to produce useful images of the CMB. Polarized and unpolarized galactic emission from 10 MHz to 3000 GHz will be analyzed by combining available data with simulations. This will be useful both for foreground-cleaning of current measurements, and for optimizing the design of future experiments. Publicly available products will include a Global Sky Model; dust maps; improved foreground-cleaned polarized CMB maps; realistic hydrogen emission 21cm foreground data cubes; and cleaning algorithms and software.
Broader impacts of this program include student training, development of broadly useful cosmological tools, and public talks and other educational outreach.
