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Description
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is designed to produce all-sky maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy. The WMAP 9-Year CMB-Free Point Source Catalog contained herein has information on 502 point sources in three frequency bands (41, 61 and 94 GHz, also known as the Q, V, and W bands, respectively) based on data from the entire 9 years of the WMAP sky survey from 10 Aug 2001 0:00 UT to 10 Aug 2010 0:00 UT, inclusive. The CMB-free method of point source identification was originally applied to one-year and three-year V- and W-band maps by Chen & Wright (2008, ApJ, 681, 747) and to five-year V- and W-band maps by Wright et al. (2009, ApJS, 180, 283). The method used here is that applied to five-year Q-, V-, and W-band maps by Chen & Wright (2009, ApJ, 694, 222) and to seven-year Q-, V-, and W-band maps by Gold et al. (2011, ApJS, 192, 15). The V- and W-band maps are smoothed to Q-band resolution. An internal linear combination (ILC) map (see Section 5.3.3 of the reference paper) is then formed from the three maps using weights such that CMB fluctuations are removed, flat-spectrum point sources are retained with fluxes normalized to Q-band, and the variance of the ILC map is minimized. The ILC map is filtered to reduce noise and suppress large angular scale structure. Peaks in the filtered map that are > 5 sigma and outside of the nine-year point source catalog mask are identified as point sources, and source positions are obtained by fitting the beam profile plus a baseline to the filtered map for each source. For the nine- year analysis, the position of the brightest pixel is adopted instead of the fit position in rare instances where they differ by > 0.1 degrees. Source fluxes are estimated by integrating the Q, V, and W temperature maps within 1.25 degrees of each source position, with a weighting function to enhance the contrast of the point source relative to background fluctuations, and applying a correction for Eddington bias due to noise (sometimes called "deboosting"). The authors identify possible 5-GHz counterparts to the WMAP sources found by cross-correlating with the GB6 (Gregory et al. 1996, ApJS, 103, 427), PMN (Griffith et al. 1994, ApJS, 90, 179; Griffith et al. 1995, ApJS, 97, 347; Wright et al. 1994, ApJS, 94, 111; Wright et al. 1996, ApJS, 103, 145), Kuehr et al. (1981, A&AS, 45, 367), and Healey et al. (2009, AJ, 138, 1032) catalogs. A 5-GHz source is identified as a counterpart if it lies within 11 arcminutes of the WMAP source position (the mean WMAP source position uncertainty is 4 arcminutes). When two or more 5 GHz sources are within 11 arcminutes, the brightest is assumed to be the counterpart and a multiple identification flag is entered in the catalog. A separate 9-year Point Source Catalog (available in Browse as the <a href="/W3Browse/wmap/wmapptsrc.html">WMAPPTSRC</a> table) has information on 501 point sources in five frequency bands from 23 to 94 GHz that were found using an alternative method. The two catalogs have 387 sources in common. As noted by Gold et al. (2011, ApJS, 192, 15), differences in the source populations detected by the two search methods are largely caused by Eddington bias in the five-band source detections due to CMB fluctuations and noise. At low flux levels, the five-band method tends to detect point sources located on positive CMB fluctuations and to overestimate their fluxes, and it tends to miss sources located in negative CMB fluctuations. Other point source detection methods have been applied to WMAP data and have identified sources not found by our methods (e.g., Scodeller et al. (2012, ApJ, 753, 27); Lanz (2012, ADASS 7); Ramos et al. (2011, A&A, 528, A75), and references therein). For more details of how the point source catalogs were constructed, see Section 5.2.2 of the reference paper. This table was last updated by the HEASARC in January 2013 based on an electronic version of Table 19 from the reference paper which was obtained from the LAMBDA web site, the file <a href="http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/map/dr5/dfp/ptsrc/wmap_ptsrc_catalog_cmb_free_9yr_v5.txt">http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/map/dr5/dfp/ptsrc/wmap_ptsrc_catalog_cmb_free_9yr_v5.txt</a>. The source_flag values of 'M' in this file were changed to the 'a' values that were used in the printed version of this table. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .
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