Statistical Analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background: Power Spectra and Foregrounds

115 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005.Finally, I examine the effect of Galactic foreground contamination on CMB experiments and describe the principle foregrounds. I show that it is possible to include the foreground components in a self-consistent fashion within the statistical framework of MAGIC and give explicit examples of how this might be achieved. Foreground contamination will become an increasingly important issue in CMB data analysis and the ability of this new algorithm to produce an exact power spectrum in a computationally feasible time, coupled with the foreground component separation and removal is an exciting development in CMB data analysis. When considered with current algorithmic developments such as the ability to include asymmetric beam shapes and deal with polarized data, the future of the Gibbs sampling approach shows great promise.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD