Testing for foreground residuals in the Planck foreground cleaned maps: A new method for designing confidence masks

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.

The final extended mask (FITS format) is only available at the CDS via anonymous ftp to http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (ftp://130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/qcat?J/A+A/578/A44 and at http://folk.uio.no/frodekh/PS_catalogue/planck_extended_mask.fits