Planck 2013 results. XXVIII. The Planck Catalogue of Compact Sources

TL;DR

The Planck Catalogue of Compact Sources (PCCS) presents a nine-band, all-sky compilation of compact sources detected in Planck's nominal mission, prioritizing completeness while maintaining reliability above 80%. It details data preparation, two independent MHW2-based detection pipelines for LFI and HFI, multi-estimator photometry, and a rigorous internal and external validation framework, including cross-matches with WMAP, ACT, PACO, SCUBA, and Herschel. The paper quantifies sensitivity and positional accuracy, analyzes the statistical properties of detected sources, and discusses the impact of Galactic cirrus on high-frequency detections, offering guidance for using the catalog for Galactic and extragalactic studies. PCCS represents a substantial advancement over the ERCSC by delivering deeper completeness and broader multi-band context, with plans to extend to full mission data and polarization in future releases, thereby enhancing foreground characterization and source physics studies.

Abstract

The Planck Catalogue of Compact Sources (PCCS) is the catalogue of sources detected in the first 15 months of Planck operations, the "nominal" mission. It consists of nine single-frequency catalogues of compact sources, both Galactic and extragalactic, detected over the entire sky. The PCCS covers the frequency range 30--857\,GHz with higher sensitivity (it is 90% complete at 180 mJy in the best channel) and better angular resolution (from ~33' to ~5') than previous all-sky surveys in this frequency band. By construction its reliability is >80% and more than 65% of the sources have been detected at least in two contiguous Planck channels. In this paper we present the construction and validation of the PCCS, its contents and its statistical characterization.

Figures (20)

• Figure 1: Sky distribution of the PCCS sources at three different channels: 30GHz (pink circles); 143GHz (magenta circles); and 857GHz (green circles). The dimension of the circles is related to the brightness of the sources and the beam size of each channel. The figure is a full-sky Aitoff projection with the Galactic equator horizontal; longitude increases to the left with the Galactic centre in the centre of the map.
• Figure 2: The Galactic and extragalactic zones used to define the S/N thresholds to meet the reliability target. The figure is a full-sky Mollweide projection. See text for further details.
• Figure 3: Comparison of the APERFLUX, PSFFLUX and GAUFLUX flux density estimates with the DETFLUX ones for the 100GHz catalogue, $(S-S_{\rm DETFLUX})/S_{\rm DETFLUX}$. Grey points correspond to sources below $|{b}|<5^\circ$ while red ones show the ones for $|{b}|>5^\circ$. Dashed lines indicates the $\pm10\%$ uncertainty level.
• Figure 4: Test of internal consistency between the two implementations of the MHW pipeline at 30GHz for $|{b}|>30^\circ$. Top panel: Cumulative percentage of sources detected by both methods. Middle panel: Cumulative percentage of sources detected by only one of the methods. Bottom panel: Comparison of the recovered flux densities (DETFLUX).
• Figure 5: The Galactic dust masks used to estimate completeness and reliability for some of the HFI channels. The unmasked zones correspond to sky fractions of 65% and 85%. The figure is a full-sky Mollweide projection. See text for further details.