WOMBAT is:
WOMBAT is dedicated to understanding sources of microwave foreground
emission and providing the cosmology community with estimates of foreground
emission as well as uncertainties
in those estimates.
And no, we are not as cute as our mascot.
WOMBAT is:
Eric Gawiser
Douglas Finkbeiner
Andrew Jaffe
Joanne Baker
Amedeo Balbi
Marc Davis
Giancarlo de Gasperis
Shaul Hanany
Bill Holzapfel
Mark Krumholz
Lexi Moustakas
Alexandre Refregier
James Robinson
Evan Scannapieco
Joe Silk
George Smoot
Jonathan C. Tan
The WOMBAT Challenge consists of realistic simulations of the microwave sky. Our simulations contain CMB, instrument noise, and emission from the major expected Galactic and extragalactic foreground sources. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to analyze these maps and determine the CMB (and foreground) input maps as well as the input radiation power spectrum (C_l) and cosmological parameters.
We predict microwave emission from Galactic dust and synchrotron emission, radio and infrared-bright galaxies, and the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect from clusters. We provide a discussion of systematic uncertainties in these predictions, which are ready to be used in subtracting foreground contamination from real-world CMB anisotropy datasets as well as the WOMBAT Challenge Simulations.
Members of WOMBAT gratefully acknowledge
the support of NASA Long-Term
Space Astrophysics
Grant No. 014-97ltsa Award #NAG5-6552 and NASA grant #NAG5-3941.
This material is based partially upon work supported
by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9617168. Any
opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in
this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
WOMBAT simulations were performed on a computer donated by Sun
Microsystems.