Abstract
Contemporary projects to measure anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are now detecting hundreds to thousands of extragalactic radio sources, most of them blazars. As a member of a group of CMB scientists involved in the construction of catalogues of such sources and their analysis, I wish to point out the potential value of CMB surveys to studies of AGN jets and their polarization. Current CMB projects, for instance, reach mJy sensitivity, offer wide sky coverage, are “blind” and generally of uniform sensitivity across the sky (hence useful statistically), make essentially simultaneous multi-frequency observations at frequencies from 30 to 857 GHz, routinely offer repeated observations of sources with interesting cadences and now generally provide polarization measurements. The aim here is not to analyze in any depth the AGN science already derived from such projects, but rather to heighten awareness of their promise for the AGN community.
Highlights
In my role as corresponding author, I am presenting this brief paper on behalf of many colleagues on the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), Planck satellite, and South Pole Telescope (SPT) teams
More to the point for this audience, all the cosmic microwave background (CMB) programs are in good agreement: calibration between them matches to a precision of a few percent
SPT source lists at 95, 150, and 220 GHz are at https://pole.uchicago.edu/public/data/mocanu13/index.html; for a fuller description, see [6]
Summary
In my role as corresponding author, I am presenting this brief paper on behalf of many colleagues on the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), Planck satellite, and South Pole Telescope (SPT) teams. I hope to convince you that extensive lists of extragalactic sources drawn up as a byproduct of programs to map the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are a rich source of data on AGN emission, including polarized emission, at radio and millimeter wavelengths. I begin by outlining some general features of CMB observations, including the frequency range generally employed, turn to the catalogues of sources these programs have produced. I list some potential advantages of these results for the study of AGN statistics, SEDs, and variability. I will present a few science results, including high-frequency polarization fractions for AGN
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