Extragalactic point sources in WMAP 5-yr maps

This work is an extension of our designing and applying a cosmic microwave background (CMB)-free technique to extract point sources in the WMAP maps. Specifically, we have formed an internal linear combination map of the three-band maps, with the weights chosen to remove the CMB anisotropy signal as well as to favor the selection of flat-spectrum sources.

We have also constructed a filter to recover the true point source flux distribution on the sky. A total of 381 sources are found in our study at the >5{sigma} level outside the WMAP point source detection mask, among which 89 are "new" (i.e., not present in the WMAP catalogs). Source fluxes have been calculated and corrected for the Eddington bias.