Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Galactic Foreground Emission

Understand

We present a new estimate of foreground emission in the WMAP data, using a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method.

• The new technique delivers maps of each foreground component for a variety of foreground models, error estimates of the uncertainty of each foreground component, and provides an overall goodness-of-fit measurement.
• The resulting foreground maps are in broad agreement with those from previous techniques used both within the collaboration and by other authors.
• We find that for WMAP data, a simple model with power-law synchrotron, free-free, and thermal dust components fits 90% of the sky with a reduced chi-squared of 1.14.