Cosmic radio dipole: Estimators and frequency dependence

Fakultät für Physik, Universität Bielefeld, Postfach 100131, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany
e-mail: t.siewert@physik.uni-bielefeld.de, matthiasr@physik.uni-bielefeld.de, dschwarz@physik.uni-bielefeld.de

Received: 3 November 2020
Accepted: 22 March 2021

Abstract

The cosmic radio dipole is of fundamental interest to studies of cosmology. Recent works have put forth open questions about the nature of the observed cosmic radio dipole. In the current work, we use simulated source count maps to test a linear and a quadratic estimator for possible biases in the estimated dipole amplitude with respect to the masking procedure. We find a superiority on the part of the quadratic estimator, which we used to analyse the TGSS-ADR1, WENSS, SUMSS, and NVSS radio source catalogues, spread over a decade of frequencies. We applied the same masking strategy to all four surveys to produce comparable results. In order to address the differences in the observed dipole amplitudes, we cross-matched the two surveys located at both ends of the analysed frequency range. For the linear estimator, we identified a general bias in the estimated dipole directions. The positional offsets of the quadratic estimator to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) dipole for skies with 10⁷ simulated sources is found to be below one degree and the absolute accuracy of the estimated dipole amplitudes is better than 10⁻³. For the four radio source catalogues, we find an increasing dipole amplitude with decreasing frequency, which is consistent with results from the literature and the results of the cross-matched catalogue. We conclude that for all analysed surveys, the observed cosmic radio dipole amplitudes exceed the expectations derived from the CMB dipole, which cannot strictly be explained by a kinematic dipole alone.