Cleaning our own Dust: Simulating and Separating Galactic Dust Foregrounds with Neural Networks

Understand

Separating galactic foreground emission from maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and quantifying the uncertainty in the CMB maps due to errors in foreground separation are important for avoiding biases in scientific conclusions.

• Our ability to quantify such uncertainty is limited by our lack of a model for the statistical distribution of the foreground emission.
• Here we use a Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (DCGAN) to create an effective non-Gaussian statistical model for intensity of emission by interstellar dust.
• For training data we use a set of dust maps inferred from observations by the Planck satellite.