Identification of galaxy clusters in cosmic microwave background maps using the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect

Understand

The Planck satellite was launched in 2009 by the European Space Agency to study the properties of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

• An expected result of the Planck data analysis is the distinction of the various contaminants of the CMB signal.
• Among these contaminants is the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect, which is caused by the inverse Compton scattering of CMB photons by high energy electrons in the intracluster medium of galaxy clusters.
• We modify a public version of the JADE (Joint Approximate Diagonalization of Eigenmatrices) algorithm, to deal with noisy data, and then use this algorithm as a tool to search for SZ clusters in two simulated datasets.