| Archive | List of WMAP Catalogs |
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The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is designed to produce all-sky maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy. The WMAP 3-Year Point Source Catalog contained herein has information on points sources in five frequency bands from 23 to 94 GHz, based on data from the first 3 years of the WMAP sky survey.The WMAP Point Source Catalog is updated compared to the 1-Year Point Source Catalog (Bennett et al. 2003, ApJS, 148, 97) to include 115 new sources whose detection is made possible by the improved sky map sensitivity, for a total of 323 point sources. The process in which the point sources were identified is discussed in Section 6.1 of the reference paper (notice that the source-detection procedure is independent of their presence in external surveys). Briefly, the weighted WMAP maps were filtered in harmonic space by the function b_l/(b_l^2C_l^cmb + C_l^noise), where b_l is the transfer function of the WMAP beam response, C_l^cmb is the CMB angular power spectrum, and C_l^noise is the noise power. Peaks that are >5 sigma in the filtered maps are fit in the unfiltered maps to a Gaussian profile plus a planar baseline. The Gaussian amplitude is converted to a source flux density using the conversion factors given in Table 5 of Page et al. (2003, ApJS, 148, 39). When a source is identified with >5 sigma confidence in any band, the flux densities for other bands are given if they are >2 sigma and the fit source width is within a factor of 2 of the true beam width.
The authors have cross-correlated detected sources with the GB6, PMN, and Kuehr et al. (1981, A&AS, 45, 367) catalogs to identify 5-GHz counterparts. If a 5-GHz source was within 11 arcminutes of the WMAP source position (the WMAP source position uncertainty is 4 arcminutes), the authors tagged the WMAP source. When more than one source lies within the cutoff radius, the brightest one was assumed to be the WMAP counterpart.
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