AbstractsAstronomy & Space Science

ABSTRACT OF THESIS submitted by Stuart Harper 
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and entitled 
“Single-Dish Intensity Mapping with the QUIJOTE MFI and GBT” January 13, 2016 Today, there are only a limited number of surveys of the sky at 1 to 20 GHz. These frequencies lie below the all-sky surveys of WMAP and Planck, but are critical in constraining the spectral slope of Galactic synchrotron emission. Knowledge of the large-scale spectral morphology of Galactic synchrotron emission is critical in the understanding of the interstellar medium and the weak signal from the polarised cosmic microwave background. Recently, ground based observations from S-PASS, C-BASS and the QUIJOTE Multifrequency Instrument (MFI) have been populating these missing frequencies. This thesis presents the first QUIJOTE MFI maps of the Northern sky in total intensity at 11, 13, 17 and 19 GHz, and the first single-dish mapping observations of Lynds dark cloud, LDN1622 at 5 and 13.7GHz. The observations from both instruments are used to probe the nature of spinning dust emission on degree and arcminute scales within the Galaxy. A full data reduction and calibration pipeline for QUIJOTE MFI time-ordered-data is described. The absolute flux density scale uncertainty of the MFI data is between 2 and 3 per cent. The pipeline characterises key properties of the MFI, such as the RFI sources, beams, bandpasses, 1/f noise and more. A key part of the pipeline was the development of an MPI ready Destriping map-maker and a maximum-likelihood map-maker. The map-making code can be applied to a range of different single-dish instruments and is used to reduce both the QUIJOTE MFI wide-survey maps of the Northern sky, and the GBT arcminute resolution raster observations of LDN 1622. A detailed discussion is given on the simulations used to test the integrity of the map-making implementation. Parametric model fitting to the SEDs of four spinning dust emission regions is performed. The MFI wide-survey maps are used in conjunction with existing multifrequency 1degree survey data. The addition of MFI maps is used to confirm the previously tentative spinning dust emission source LDN 1582/84. The mean peak frequency of spinning dust emission over the four spinning dust sources is found to be ⟨νsp⟩ = 27.2 +/- 0.7 GHz, and the mean ratio of the peak spinning dust brightness over the dust optical depth is ⟨Asp/τ250⟩ = 1.24 +/- 0.18 × 104 Jy/τ250. Spectral index maps are derived from the MFI wide-survey data in combination with 408 MHz and WMAP 23 GHz data. These maps are used to further quantify the ubiquity of spinning dust emission throughout the Galaxy. The results show that the median flux density spectral index within the inner Galactic disk for |b| < 2° is 0.24 +/- 0.07. This implies that at 23 GHz, spinning dust emission contributes 25 +/- 5 per cent of the total integrated emission within the inner disk of the Galaxy. Some of the Python codes used to process data and generate images in this thesis are available online at:…