Analysis of Small- and Medium-Scale Cosmic Microwave Background Measurements

Anisotropies in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background have been detected on a range of scales by several different experiments. In principle, the largest barrier to a clean interpretation of the experimental results is contamination by foreground sources. We address this issue by projecting out likely sources of foreground contamination from seven separate small-angle and medium-angle experiments. All of the experiments are consistent so far with the simplest inflationary models; for n0ex{0ex}=0ex{0ex}1 the experiments' combined best-fit quadrupole amplitude is Qₑ₌ₒ-₏ₒ{0ex{0ex}=0ex{0ex}18}-₁^+30ex{0ex}, in excellent agreement with the Cosmic Background Explorer two-year data.