CIBER Fourth Flight Fluctuation Analysis: Pseudopower Spectrum Formalism, Improved Source Masking, and Validation on Mocks
Creators
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1.
California Institute of Technology
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University of California, Berkeley
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3.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
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University of California, Irvine
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Kwansei Gakuin University
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Institute of Space and Astronautical Science
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7.
Rochester Institute of Technology
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Jet Propulsion Lab
Abstract
Precise, unbiased measurements of extragalactic background anisotropies require careful treatment of systematic effects in fluctuation-based, broadband intensity mapping measurements. In this paper, we detail improvements in methodology for the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER), concentrating on flat field errors and source masking errors. In order to bypass the use of field differences, which mitigate flat field errors but reduce sensitivity, we characterize and correct for the flat field on pseudopower spectra, which includes both additive and multiplicative biases. To more effectively mask point sources at 1.1 and 1.8 μm, we develop a technique for predicting masking catalogs that utilizes optical and near-infrared photometry through random forest regression. This allows us to mask over 2 Vega mag deeper than the completeness limits of Two Micron All Sky Survey alone, with errors in the shot noise power remaining below <10% at all masking depths considered. Through detailed simulations of CIBER observations, we validate our formalism and demonstrate unbiased recovery of the sky fluctuations on realistic mocks. We demonstrate that residual flat field errors comprise <20% of the final CIBER power spectrum uncertainty with this methodology.
Copyright and License
© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Acknowledgement
We thank Bryan Steinbach for helpful discussions regarding all things mode coupling related. This material is based upon work supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under APRA research grants NNX10AE12G, NNX16AJ69G, 80NSSC20K0595, 80NSSC22K0355, and 80NSSC22K1512.
This publication makes use of data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation.
The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen’s University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation grant No. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Software References
matplotlib, numpy, scipy, sklearn, CAMB.
Files
Feder_2025_ApJ_991_87.pdf
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Additional details
Related works
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2501.17932 (arXiv)
Funding
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- NNX10AE12G
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- NNX16AJ69G
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NSSC20K0595
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NSSC22K0355
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NSSC22K1512
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- NNX08AR22G
- National Science Foundation
- AST-1238877
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
Dates
- Accepted
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2025-08-08
- Available
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2025-09-17Published online