The Simons Observatory (SO) is a new cosmic microwave background experiment being built on Cerro Toco in Chile, due to begin observations in the early 2020s. We describe the scientific goals of the experiment, motivate the design, and forecast its performance. SO will measure the temperature and polarization anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background in six frequency bands centered at: 27, 39, 93, 145, 225 and 280 GHz. The initial configuration of SO will have three small-aperture 0.5-m telescopes and one large-aperture 6-m telescope, with a total of 60,000 cryogenic bolometers. Our key science goals are to characterize the primordial perturbations, measure the number of relativistic species and the mass of neutrinos, test for deviations from a cosmological constant, improve our understanding of galaxy evolution, and constrain the duration of reionization. The small aperture telescopes will target the largest angular scales observable from Chile, mapping ≈ 10% of the sky to a white noise level of 2 µK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, to measure the primordial tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, at a target level of σ(r) = 0.003. The large aperture telescope will map ≈ 40% of the sky at arcminute angular resolution to an expected white noise level of 6 µK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, overlapping with the majority of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope sky region and partially with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. With up to an order of magnitude lower polarization noise than maps from the Planck satellite, the high-resolution sky maps will constrain cosmological parameters derived from the damping tail, gravitational lensing of the microwave background, the primordial bispectrum, and the thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects, and will aid in delensing the large-angle polarization signal to measure the tensorto-scalar ratio. The survey will also provide a legacy catalog of 16,000 galaxy clusters and more than 20,000 extragalactic sources a .

The European Space Agency's Planck satellite, which is dedicated to studying the early Universe and its subsequent evolution, was launched on 14 May 2009. It scanned the microwave and submillimetre sky continuously between 12 August 2009 and 23 October 2013. In February 2015, ESA and the Planck Collaboration released the second set of cosmology products based on data from the entire Planck mission, including both temperature and polarization, along with a set of scientific and technical papers and a web-based explanatory supplement. This paper gives an overview of the main characteristics of the data and the data products in the release, as well as the associated cosmological and astrophysical science results and papers. The data products include maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, diffuse foregrounds in temperature and polarization, catalogues of compact Galactic and extragalactic sources (including separate catalogues of Corresponding author: C. R. Lawrence, e-mail: charles.lawrence@jpl.nasa.govArticle published by EDP Sciences A1, page 1 of 38 A&A 594, A1 (2016) Sunyaev-Zeldovich clusters and Galactic cold clumps), and extensive simulations of signals and noise used in assessing uncertainties and the performance of the analysis methods. The likelihood code used to assess cosmological models against the Planck data is described, along with a CMB lensing likelihood. Scientific results include cosmological parameters derived from CMB power spectra, gravitational lensing, and cluster counts, as well as constraints on inflation, non-Gaussianity, primordial magnetic fields, dark energy, and modified gravity, and new results on low-frequency Galactic foregrounds.

Delensing is an increasingly important technique to reverse the gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and thus reveal primordial signals the lensing may obscure. We present a first demonstration of delensing on Planck temperature maps using the cosmic infrared background (CIB). Reversing the lensing deflections in Planck CMB temperature maps using a linear combination of the 545 and 857 GHz maps as a lensing tracer, we find that the lensing effects in the temperature power spectrum are reduced in a manner consistent with theoretical expectations. In particular, the characteristic sharpening of the acoustic peaks of the temperature power spectrum resulting from successful delensing is detected at a significance of 16 σ, with an amplitude of A delens = 1.12±0.07 relative to the expected value of unity. This first demonstration on data of CIB delensing, and of delensing techniques in general, is significant because lensing removal will soon be essential for achieving high-precision constraints on inflationary B-mode polarization.

We report the identification of a recurrent ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX), a highly absorbed X-ray source (possibly a background AGN), and a young supernova remnant near the center of the starburst galaxy M82. From a series of Chandra observations taken from 1999 to 2005, we found that the transient ULX first appeared in 1999 October. The source turned off in 2000 January, but later reappeared and has been active since then. The X-ray luminosity of this source varies from below the detection level ($2:5 ; 10 38 ergs s À1 ) to its active state between $7 ; 10 39 and 1:3 ; 10 40 ergs s À1 (in the 0.5Y10 keV energy band) and shows unusual spectral changes. The X-ray spectra of some Chandra observations are best fitted with an absorbed power-law model with photon index ranging from 1.3 to 1.7. These spectra are similar to those of Galactic black hole binary candidates seen in the low/hard state, except that a very hard spectrum was seen in one of the observations. By comparing with near-infrared images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, the ULX is found to be located within a young star cluster. Radio imaging indicates that it is associated with a H ii region. We suggest that the ULX is likely to be a >100 M intermediate-mass black hole in the low/hard state. In addition to the transient ULX, we also found a highly absorbed hard X-ray source which is likely to be an AGN and an ultraluminous X-ray-emitting young supernova remnant which may be related to a 100 yr old gamma-ray burst event, within 2 00 of the transient ULX.

We have looked for bulk motions of galaxy clusters in the WMAP 7 year data. We isolate the kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) signal by filtering the WMAP Q, V and W band maps with multifrequency matched filters, that utilize the spatial properties of the kinetic SZ signal to optimize detection. We try two filters: a filter that has no spectral dependence, and a filter that utilizes the spectral properties of the kinetic and thermal SZ signals to remove the thermal SZ bias. We measure the monopole and dipole spherical harmonic coefficients of the kinetic SZ signal, as well as the ℓ = 2 − 5 modes, at the locations of 736 ROSAT observed galaxy clusters. We find no significant power in the kinetic SZ signal at these multipoles with either filter, consistent with the ΛCDM prediction. Our limits are a factor of ∼ 3 more sensitive than the claimed bulk flow detection of Kashlinsky et al. (2009). Using simulations we estimate that in maps filtered by our matched filter with no spectral dependence there is a thermal SZ dipole that would be mistakenly measured as a bulk motion of ∼ 2000 − 4000 km/s. For the WMAP data the signal to noise ratio obtained with the unbiased filter is almost an order of magnitude lower.