1998/10/20 by J. G. Bartlett, Alain Blanchard, A. Blanchard +6
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/9810316
To be published in ``The CMB and the Planck Mission'', proceedings of a workshop held in Santander, Spain, June 1998
arxiv created 1998/10/20 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
We discuss the problem of constraining cosmological parameters with cosmic microwave background band--power estimates. Because these latter are variances, they do not have gaussian distribution functions and, hence, the standard χ2--approach is not strictly applicable. A general purpose approximation to experimental band--power likelihood functions is proposed, which requires only limited experimental details. Comparison with the full likelihood function calculated for several experiments shows that the approximation works well.