Planck Catalog of 353-GHz Compact Sources (PCCS) Release 2

Planck was a European Space Agency (ESA) mission, with significant contributions from the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA). It was the third generation of space-based cosmic microwave background experiments, after the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Planck was launched on 14 May 2009 on an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana. Following a cruise to the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, cooling and in orbit checkout, Planck initiated the First Light Survey on 12 August 2009. Planck then continuously measured the intensity of the sky over a range of frequencies from 30 to 857 GHz (wavelengths of 1 cm to 350 micron) with spatial resolutions ranging from about 33 to 5 arcminutes, respectively. The Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) on Planck provided temperature and polarization information using radiometers which operated between 30 and 70 GHz. The High Frequency Instrument (HFI) used pairs of polarization-sensitive bolometers at each of four frequencies between 100 and 353 GHz but did not measure polarization information in the two upper HFI bands at 545 and 857 GHz. The lowest Planck frequencies overlapped with WMAP, and the highest frequencies extended far into the submillimeter in order to improve separation between Galactic foregrounds and the cosmic microwave background (CMB). By extending to wavelengths longer than those at which the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) operated, Planck provided an unprecedented window into dust emission at far-infrared and submillimeter wavelengths. The Second Planck Catalogue of Compact Sources is a list of discrete objects detected in single-frequency maps from the full duration of the Planck mission and supersedes previous versions. It consists of compact sources, both Galactic and extragalactic, detected over the entire sky. Compact sources detected in the lower frequency channels are assigned to the PCCS2, while at higher frequencies they are assigned to one of two subcatalogs, the PCCS2 or PCCS2E, depending on their location on the sky. The first of these (PCCS2) covers most of the sky and allows the user to produce subsamples at higher reliabilities than the target 80% integral reliability of the catalog. The second (PCCS2E) contains sources detected in sky regions where the diffuse emission makes it difficult to quantify the reliability of the detections. Both the PCCS2 and PCCS2E include polarization measurements, in the form of polarized flux densities, or upper limits, and orientation angles for all seven polarization-sensitive Planck channels. The improved data-processing of the full-mission maps and their reduced noise levels allow the authors to increase the number of objects in the catalog, improving its completeness for the target 80% reliability as compared with the previous versions, the PCCS and the Early Release Compact Source Catalogue (ERCSC). The Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) Data Processing Center (DPC) produced the 30, 44, and 70 GHz maps after the completion of eight full surveys (spanning the period from 12 August 2009 to 3 August 2013). In addition, special LFI maps covering the period 1 April 2013 to 30 June 2013 were produced in order to compare the Planck flux-density scales with those of the Very Large Array and the Australia Telescope Compact Array, by performing simultaneous observations of a sample of sources over that period. The High Frequency Instrument (HFI) DPC produced the 100-, 143-, 217-, 353-, 545-, and 857-GHz maps after five full surveys (from 2009 August 12 to 2012 January 11). As in the PCCS, the PCCS2 provides four different measures of the flux density for each source. They are determined by the source detection algorithm (DETFLUX), aperture photometry (APERFLUX), point spread function fitting (PSFFLUX), and Gaussian fitting (GAUFLUX). Only the first is obtained from the filtered maps; the other measures are estimated from the full-sky maps at the positions of the sources. The source detection algorithm photometry, the aperture photometry, and the point spread function (PSF) fitting use the Planck band-average effective beams, calculated with FEBeCoP (Fast Effective Beam Convolution in Pixel space). Note that only the PSF fitting algorithm takes into account the variation of the PSF with position on the sky. The PCCS2 has been produced from the Planck full-mission maps (eight sky surveys in the LFI and five sky surveys in the HFI), and therefore supersedes the previous catalogs (for the PCCS only 1.5 surveys were analyzed). It also includes the latest calibration and beam information, and the authors have improved some of the algorithms used to measure the photometry of the sources. This table contains the PCCS2 subsample of the PCCS Public Release 2 table of sources detected at 353 GHz. One of the primary differences of this release of the PCCS from previous releases is the division of the six highest frequency catalogs into two subcatalogs, the PCCS2 and the PCCS2E. This division separates sources for which the reliability (the fraction of sources above a given S/N which are real) can be quantified (PCCS2) from those of unknown reliability (PCCS2E). This separation is primarily based on the Galactic coordinates of the source, as described in Section 2.3 of the reference paper. The PCCS2E subcatalog for this frequency is not included in this HEASARC table but is available at the CDS as the file &lt;a href="http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/ftp/cats/J/A+A/594/A26/pccs353e.dat.gz"&gt;http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/ftp/cats/J/A+A/594/A26/pccs353e.dat.gz&lt;/a&gt;. Where the HEASARC parameter names in this table differ from those used in the original table, the original names are listed parenthetically in upper case at the end of the parameter description. This table was created by the HEASARC in May 2017 based upon the &lt;a href="https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/ftp/cats/J/A+A/594/A26"&gt;CDS Catalog J/A+A/594/A26&lt;/a&gt; file pccs353.dat. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .

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Organization: National Aeronautics and Space Administration