Atacama Cosmology Telescope: High-resolution component-separated maps across one third of the sky
William R. Coulton, Mathew S. Madhavacheril, Adriaan J. Duivenvoorden, J. Colin Hill, Irene Abril-Cabezas, Peter A. R. Ade, Simone Aiola, Tommy Alford, M. Amiri, Stefania Amodeo, Rui An, Zachary Atkins, Jason E. Austermann, Nicholas Battaglia, E. S. Battistelli, James A. Beall, Rachel Bean, Benjamin Beringue, Tanay Bhandarkar, Emily Biermann, Boris Bolliet, J. Richard Bond, Hongbo Cai, Erminia Calabrese, Victoria Calafut, Valentina Capalbo, Felipe Carrero, Grace Chesmore, Hsiao-Mei Cho, Steve K. Choi, Susan E. Clark, Rodrigo Córdova Rosado, Nicholas F. Cothard, Kevin Coughlin, Kevin T. Crowley, Mark J. Devlin, Simon Dicker, Peter Doze, Cody J. Duell, Shannon M. Duff, Jo Dunkley, Rolando Dünner, Valentina Fanfani, Max Fankhanel, Gerrit S. Farren, Simone Ferraro, Rodrigo Freundt, Brittany Fuzia, Patricio A. Gallardo, X. Garrido, Jahmour J. Givans, Vera Gluscevic, Joseph E. Golec, Yilun Guan, M. Halpern, Dongwon Han, Matthew Hasselfield, Erin Healy, Shawn Henderson, Brandon S. Hensley, Carlos Hervías-Caimapo, Gene C. Hilton, Matt Hilton, Adam D. Hincks, Renée Hložek, Shuay-Pwu Patty Ho, Zachary B. Huber, Johannes Hubmayr, K. M. Huffenberger, John P. Hughes, K. D. Irwin, Giovanni Isopi, Hidde T. Jense, Ben Keller, Joshua Kim, Kenda Knowles, Brian J. Koopman, Arthur Kosowsky, Darby Kramer, Aleksandra Kusiak, Adrien La Posta, Victoria Lakey, Eunseong Lee, Zack Li, Yaqiong Li, M. Limon, Martine Lokken, Thibaut Louis, Marius Lungu, N. MacCrann, Amanda MacInnis, Diego Maldonado, Felipe Maldonado, Maya Mallaby-Kay, Gabriela A. Marques, Joshiwa van Marrewijk, Fiona McCarthy, J. J. McMahon, Yogesh Mehta, F. Menanteau
Abstract
Observations of the millimeter sky contain valuable information on a number of signals, including the blackbody cosmic microwave background (CMB), Galactic emissions, and the Compton-$y$ distortion due to the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect. Extracting new insight into cosmological and astrophysical questions often requires combining multiwavelength observations to spectrally isolate one component. In this work, we present a new arc-minute-resolution Compton-$y$ map, which traces out the line-of-sight-integrated electron pressure, as well as maps of the CMB in intensity and E-mode polarization, across a third of the sky (around $13,000\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{deg}}^{2}$). We produce these through a joint analysis of data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) data release 4 and 6 at frequencies of roughly 93, 148, and 225 GHz, together with data from the Planck satellite at frequencies between 30 and 545 GHz. We present detailed verification of an internal linear combination pipeline implemented in a needlet frame that allows us to efficiently suppress Galactic contamination and account for spatial variations in the ACT instrument noise. These maps provide a significant advance, in noise levels and resolution, over the existing Planck component-separated maps and will enable a host of science goals including studies of cluster and galaxy astrophysics, inferences of the cosmic velocity field, primordial non-Gaussianity searches, and gravitational lensing reconstruction of the CMB.