Microwave anisotropies from the Galactic halo

Details Microwave anisotropies from the Galactic halo Microwave anisotropies from the Galactic halo

2002-10-22

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0210483v2

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

16 pages, 5 figures, ApJ Submitted, fixed error in I->T conversion and predicted anisotropies are now easier to detect

Scientific paper

Models in which a large fraction of the Galactic dark matter takes the form of cold gas clouds imply that there is thermal microwave emission from the Galactic dark halo. Such models can therefore be directly constrained by data on the microwave sky, and in particular the very sensitive observations of microwave anisotropies which are now being made. To this end we have computed the anisotropy power-spectrum expected for a Galactic dark halo made of cold, dense gas clouds, including the effects of clustering with a CDM-like mass spectrum of mini-halo substructure. The power-spectrum displays two peaks: one, at l~50, is the Poisson noise for the mini-halos, and the second, much larger and at much higher l, is the Poisson noise of the individual clouds. Because it appears on small (milli-arcsecond) angular scales, where the instrumental sensitivity is inevitably very poor, the latter signal is not directly detectable. By contrast, clusters of cold gas clouds may contribute significantly to the observed anisotropies if their emission has a grey-body spectrum. In this case the peak fluctuation, at l~50, amounts to 4/|sin b| micro-K in the Rayleigh-Jeans limit, and is the dominant Galactic foreground between 40 and 80 GHz. It will be possible to constrain this foreground component using low-latitude data from the MAP satellite, providing that its spectrum conforms to a grey-body. If the spectrum is ``dusty'' there will be relatively little power at frequencies below the thermal peak, and in this case the predicted anisotropies are shown to be negligible.

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