Bibcode
Rubiño-Martín, J. A.; Aliaga, Antonio M.; Barreiro, R. B.; Battye, Richard A.; Carreira, Pedro; Cleary, Kieran; Davies, Rod D.; Davis, Richard J.; Dickinson, Clive; Génova-Santos, Ricardo; Grainge, Keith; Gutiérrez, Carlos M.; Hafez, Yaser A.; Hobson, Michael P.; Jones, Michael E.; Kneissl, Rüdiger; Lancaster, Katy; Lasenby, Anthony; Leahy, J. P.; Maisinger, Klaus; Martínez-González, Enrique; Pooley, Guy G.; Rajguru, Nutan; Rebolo, Rafael; Sanz, José Luis; Saunders, Richard D. E.; Savage, Richard S.; Scaife, Anna; Scott, Paul; Slosar, Anže; Taylor, Angela C.; Titterington, David; Waldram, Elizabeth; Watson, Robert A.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 369, Issue 2, pp. 909-920.
Advertised on:
6
2006
Citations
16
Refereed citations
15
Description
We have used the Rayner and Best smooth tests of goodness-of-fit to
study the Gaussianity of the Very Small Array (VSA) data. These tests
are designed to be sensitive to the presence of `smooth' deviations from
a given distribution, and are applied to the data transformed into
normalized signal-to-noise eigenmodes. In a previous work, they have
been already adapted and applied to simulated observations of
interferometric experiments. In this paper, we extend the practical
implementation of the method to deal with mosaiced observations, by
introducing the Arnoldi algorithm. This method permits us to solve large
eigenvalue problems with low computational cost.
Out of the 41 published VSA individual pointings dedicated to
cosmological [cosmic microwave background (CMB)] observations, 37 are
found to be consistent with Gaussianity, whereas four pointings show
deviations from Gaussianity. In two of them, these deviations can be
explained as residual systematic effects of a few visibility points
which, when corrected, have a negligible impact on the angular power
spectrum. The non-Gaussianity found in the other two (adjacent)
pointings seems to be associated to a local deviation of the power
spectrum of these fields with respect to the common power spectrum of
the complete data set, at angular scales of the third acoustic peak (l =
700-900). No evidence of residual systematics is found in this case, and
unsubtracted point sources are not a plausible explanation either. If
those visibilities are removed, the differences of the new power
spectrum with respect to the published one only affect three bins. A
cosmological analysis based on this new VSA power spectrum alone shows
no differences in the parameter constraints with respect to our
published results, except for the physical baryon density, which
decreases by 10 percent.
Finally, the method has been also used to analyse the VSA observations
in the Corona Borealis supercluster region. Our method finds a clear
deviation (99.82 percent) with respect to Gaussianity in the
second-order moment of the distribution, and which cannot be explained
as systematic effects. A detailed study shows that the non-Gaussianity
is produced in scales of l ~ 500, and that this deviation is intrinsic
to the data (in the sense that cannot be explained in terms of a
Gaussian field with a different power spectrum). This result is
consistent with the Gaussianity studies in the Corona Borealis data
presented in Génova-Santos et al. which show a strong decrement
that cannot be explained as primordial CMB.