1994/08/12 by A. Kogut, G. Hinshaw, Kogut, A. +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #Scientific Research and Discoveries #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/9408038
uuencoded compressed PostScript file (8 pages including 2 figures) submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, August 12, 1994
arxiv created 1994/08/12 · openalex publication_date 1994/08/12 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
High-contrast peaks in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy can appear as unresolved sources to observers. We fit simulated CMB maps generated with a cold dark matter model to a set of unresolved features at instrumental resolution 0.5 degrees to 1.5 degrees and present the integral density per steradian n(>|T|) of unresolved features brighter than threshold temperature |T|. A typical medium-scale experiment observing 0.001 sr at 0.5 degree resolution would expect to observe one unresolved feature brighter than 85 \muK after convolution with the beam profile, with less than 5% probability to observe a source brighter than 150 \muK. Increasing the power-law index of primordial density perturbations n from 1 to 1.5 raises these temperature limits |T| by a factor of 2. The results are only weakly dependent on the assumed values of the Hubble constant and baryon density.