A Search for Dust Clouds near the Solar System with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe

威尔金森微波各向异性探测器(WMAP)建立了一张毫米波长的天球地图。WMAP被设计用来描述宇宙微波背景(CMB)辐射的涨落，它对许多前景源也很敏感，例如来自宇宙尘埃的热发射。为了从观测中去除星系尘埃的排放，建立了专门的模型。然而，其他一些前景可能一直下落不明。此外，WMAP的数据表明，可能存在不明原因的偏差，表现为低功率和可疑的相互对齐，以及与CMB涨落多极扩展的四极矩和八极矩的太阳系几何形状的偏差。因此，拟议项目的目标是搜索WMAP数据以寻找当地的微波辐射源，并在新的波长范围内限制太阳系附近的尘埃云。该项目还可能有助于解决低阶多极的神秘排列，从而产生重要的宇宙学影响。

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has built a map of the celestial sphere at millimetre wavelengths. Designed to characterize the fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, WMAP is also sensitive to many foreground sources, e.g. the thermal emission from cosmic dust. Dedicated models were constructed to remove the emission by galactic dust from the observations. Some other foregrounds, however, may have stayed unaccounted. Moreover, the WMAP data suggest that an unaccounted bias is likely, revealed by the low power and suspicious alignment mutually and with the solar-system geometry of the quadrupole and octopole moments of the multipole expansion of the CMB fluctuations. Thus the goal of the proposed project is to search the WMAP data for local sources of microwave radiation and to put constraints on dust clouds in the vicinity of the Solar system in a new wavelength range. The project might also help to resolve the mysterious alignment of the low-order multipoles, and thus have important cosmological repercussions.