Over the last few years, needlets have emerged as a useful tool for the analysis of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data. Our aim in this paper is first to introduce in the CMB literature a different form of needlets, known as Mexican needlets, first discussed in the mathematical literature by Geller and Mayeli -2 -(2009a,b). We then proceed with an extensive study of the properties of both standard and Mexican needlets; these properties depend on some parameters which can be tuned in order to optimize the performance for a given application. Our second aim in this paper is then to give practical advice on how to adjust these parameters for WMAP and Planck data in order to achieve the best properties for a given problem in CMB data analysis. In particular we investigate localization properties in real and harmonic space and propose a recipe on how to quantify the influence of galactic and point source masks on the needlet coefficients. We also show that for certain parameter values, the Mexican needlets provide a close approximation to the Spherical Mexican Hat Wavelets (whence their name), with some advantages concerning their numerical implementation and the derivation of their statistical properties.

We have developed a new needlet based method to detect point sources in cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps and have applied it to the WMAP 7 year data. We use both the individual frequency channels as well as internal templates, the difference between pairs of frequency channels, with the advantage that the CMB component is eliminated. Using the area of the sky outside the Kq85 galactic mask, we detect a total of 2102 point sources at the 5σ level in either the frequency maps or the internal templates. Of these, 1116 are detected either at 5σ directly in the frequency channels or at 5σ in the internal templates and ≥ 3σ at the corresponding position in the frequency channels. Of the 1116 sources, 603 are detections which have not been reported so far in WMAP data. We have made a catalogue of these sources available with position and flux estimated in the WMAP channels where they are seen. In total, we identified 1029 of the 1116 sources with counterparts at 5GHz and 69 at other frequencies.Subject headings: (cosmology:) cosmic microwave background -cosmology: observations -methods: data analysis -methods: statistical a Note that here as opposed to (Scodeller et al. (2011)) the distance of influence is from the center of the source. a NB: this error on the amplitude does not take into account the error of the effective area (used to convert Kelvin to Jansky), since this error is dependent on the value of the amplitude. b Represents the average number of detections not identified with an input source, discrepancies from "After χ 2 elimination" minus "Identified" come from rounding. c Represents the average input flux limit from where 99% of the simulated input sources are detected. "Channels" standing for the sources detected directly in the 5 channels; "int. temp." for those detected in internal templates and being non-zero in channels at the 3σ level; "combined" those detected in either the channels or the templates.We compare the mean value of the estimated amplitudes in the simulations with the corresponding input amplitude. We find that the estimated amplitudes are unbiased with

We investigate models where structure formation is initiated by scaling seeds: We consider rapidly expanding relativistic shells of energy and show that they can fit current CMB and large scale structure data if they expand with super-luminal velocities. These acausally expanding shells provide a viable alternative to inflation for cosmological structure formation with the same minimal number of parameters to characterize the initial fluctuations. Causally expanding shells alone cannot fit present data. Hybrid models where causal shells and inflation are mixed also provide good fits.

We test for foreground residuals in the foreground-cleaned Planck cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps outside and inside the U73 mask commonly used for cosmological analysis. The aim of this paper is to introduce a new method of validating masks by looking at the differences in cleaned maps obtained by different component-separation methods. By analyzing the power spectrum, as well as the mean, rms, and skewness of needlet coefficients on separate equatorial bands running from the poles to the equator outside and inside the U73 mask, we first confirm that the pixels already masked by U73 are highly contaminated and cannot be used for cosmological analysis. We further find that the U73 mask needs extension in order to reduce large-scale foreground residuals to a level of less than 20% of the standard deviation of CMB fluctuations within the bands closest to the galactic equator. We also find 276 point-like residuals in the cleaned foreground maps that are currently not masked by the U73 mask. About 80 of these are identified as sz clusters that have not been properly subtracted by the component separation methods, and the rest are strongly correlated with the Planck dust map, indicating point-like dust residuals. Our final publicly available extended mask leaves 65.9% of the sky for cosmological analysis. This extended mask may be important for analyses on local sky patches; for the full sky power spectrum, we have shown that the unmasked residuals have very little impact.

In (Scodeller et al.) a new and extended point source catalogue obtained from the WMAP 7-year data was presented. It includes most of the sources included in the standard WMAP 7-year point source catalogues as well as a large number of new detections. Here we study the effects on the estimated CMB power spectrum when taking the newly detected point sources into consideration. We create point source masks for all the 2102 sources that we detected as well as a smaller one for the 665 sources detected in the Q, V and W bands. We also create WMAP7 maps with point sources subtracted in order to compare with the spectrum obtained with source masks. The extended point source masks and point source cleaned WMAP7 maps are made publicly available. Using the proper residual correction, we find that the CMB power spectrum obtained from the point source cleaned map without any source mask is fully consistent with the spectrum obtained from the masked map. We further find that the spectrum obtained masking all 2102 sources is consistent with the results obtained using the standard WMAP 7-year point source mask (KQ85y7). We also verify that the removal of point sources does not introduce any skewness.