Cosmic Infrared Background Fluctuations and Zodiacal Light

Understand

We have performed a specific observational test to measure the effect that the zodiacal light can have on measurements of the spatial fluctuations of the near-IR background.

• Previous estimates of possible fluctuations caused by zodiacal light have often been extrapolated from observations of the thermal emission at longer wavelengths and low angular resolution, or from IRAC observations of high latitude fields where zodiacal light is faint and not strongly varying with time.
• The new observations analyzed here target the COSMOS field, at low ecliptic latitude where the zodiacal light intensity varies by factors of $\sim2$ over the range of solar elongations at which the field can be observed.
• We find that the white noise component of the spatial power spectrum of the background is correlated with the modeled zodiacal light intensity.