Cleaned Three-Year WMAP CMB Map: Magnitude of the Quadrupole and Alignment of Large Scale Modes

Abstract

[Abridged] We have produced a cleaned map of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) 3-year data using an improved foreground subtraction technique. We perform an internal linear combination (ILC) to subtract the Galactic foreground emission from the temperature fluctuations observed by the WMAP. We divide the whole sky into hundreds of pixel groups with similar foreground spectral indices over a range of WMAP frequencies, apply the ILC for each group, and obtain a CMB map with foreground emission effectively reduced. With the resulting foreground-reduced ILC map, we have investigated the known anomalies in CMB maps at large scales. The quadrupole and the octopole powers measured from our ILC map are \delta T_2^2 = 276_{-126}^{+94} uK^2 and \delta T_3^2 = 952_{-83}^{+64} uK^2, respectively. The measured quadrupole power is lower than the value expected in the concordance LCDM model (1250 uK^2), in which the probability of finding a quadrupole power lower than the measured value is 5.7%. We have confirmed that the quadrupole and the octopole are strongly aligned with angle \theta_{23} = 11.8_{-8.0}^{+6.4} degree, and are planar with high planarity parameters t=0.98_{-0.02}^{+0.02} for l=2 and t=0.91_{-0.03}^{+0.02} for l=3. The observed angular separation \theta_{23} is marginally statistically significant because the probability of finding the angular separation as low as the observed value is 4.3%. However, the observed planarity is not statistically significant. The probability of observing such a planarity as high as the measured t values is over 18%. The ILC simulations show that the residual foreground emission in the ILC map does not affect the estimated values significantly.