Measurements of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation at 0.5 deg angular scales near the star gamma ursae minoris

Abstract

We present results from a four-frequency observation of a 6^deg^ x 0.6^deg^ strip of the sky centered near the star Gamma Ursae Minoris (GUM) during the fourth flight of the Millimeter-wave Anisotropy experiment (MAX). The observation was made with a 1.4^deg^ peak-to-peak sinusoidal chop in all bands. The FWHM beam sizes were 0.55^deg^ +/- 0.05^deg^ at 3.5 cm^-1^ and 0.75^deg^ +/- 0.05^deg^ at 6,9, and 14 cm^- 1^. During this observation significant correlated structure was observed at 3.5,6 and 9 cm^-1^ with amplitudes similar to those observed in the GUM region during the second and third flights of MAX. The frequency spectrum is consistent with cosmic microwave background (CMB) and inconsistent with thermal emission from interstellar dust. The extrapolated amplitudes of synchrotron and free-free emission are too small to account for the amplitude of the observed structure. If all of the structure is attributed to CMB anisotropy with a Gaussian autocorrelation function and a coherence angle of 25', then the most probable values of {DELTA}T/T_CMB_ in the 3.5, 6, and 9 cm^-1^ bands are 4.3_-1.6_^+2.7^ x 10^-5^, 2.8_-1.1_^+4.3^ x 10^-5^, and 3.5_-1.6_^+3.0^ x 10^-5^ (95% confidence upper and lower limits), respectively.