ABSTRACT Star-forming galaxies are rich reservoirs of dust, both warm and cold. But the cold dust emission is faint alongside the relatively bright and ubiquitous warm dust emission. Recently, evidence for a very cold dust (VCD) component has also been revealed via millimetre/submillimetre (mm/sub-mm) photometry of some galaxies. This component, despite being the most massive of the three dust components in star-forming galaxies, is by virtue of its very low temperature, faint and hard to detect together with the relatively bright emission from warmer dust. Here, we analyse the dust content of a carefully selected sample of four galaxies detected by IRAS, WISE, and South Pole Telescope (SPT), whose spectral energy distributions (SEDs) were modelled to constrain their potential cold dust content. Low-frequency radio observations using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) were carried out to segregate cold dust emission from non-thermal emission in mm/sub-mm wavebands. We also carried out AstroSat/Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) observations for some galaxies to constrain their SED at shorter wavelengths so as to enforce energy balance for the SED modelling. We constructed their SEDs across a vast wavelength range (extending from UV to radio frequencies) by assembling global photometry from GALEX FUV + NUV, UVIT, Johnson BRI, 2MASS, WISE, IRAC, IRAS, AKARI, ISO PHOT, Planck HFI, SPT, and GMRT. The SEDs were modelled with cigale to estimate their basic properties, in particular to constrain the masses of their total and VCD components. Although the galaxies’ dust masses are dominated by warmer dust, there are hints of VCD in two of the targets, NGC 7496 and NGC 7590.

We study the polarization properties of extragalactic sources at 95 and 150 GHz in the SPTpol 500 deg2 survey. We estimate the polarized power by stacking maps at known source positions, and correct for noise bias by subtracting the mean polarized power at random positions in the maps. We show that the method is unbiased using a set of simulated maps with similar noise properties to the real SPTpol maps. We find a flux-weighted mean-squared polarization fraction 〈p2〉= [8.9 ± 1.1] × 10−4 at 95 GHz and [6.9 ± 1.1] × 10−4 at 150 GHz for the full sample. This is consistent with the values obtained for a subsample of active galactic nuclei. For dusty sources, we find 95 per cent upper limits of 〈p2〉95 < 16.9 × 10−3 and 〈p2〉150 < 2.6 × 10−3. We find no evidence that the polarization fraction depends on the source flux or observing frequency. The 1σ upper limit on measured mean-squared polarization fraction at 150 GHz implies that extragalactic foregrounds will be subdominant to the CMB E and B mode polarization power spectra out to at least ℓ ≲ 5700 (ℓ ≲ 4700) and ℓ ≲ 5300 (ℓ ≲ 3600), respectively, at 95 (150) GHz.

We present a sample-variance-limited measurement of the temperature power spectrum (TT) of the cosmic microwave background using observations of a ∼1500 deg2 field made by the SPT-3G in 2018. We report multifrequency power spectrum measurements at 95, 150, and 220 GHz covering the angular multipole range 750≤ℓ<3000. We combine this TT measurement with the published polarization power spectrum measurements from the 2018 observing season and update their associated covariance matrix to complete the SPT-3G 2018 TT/TE/EE dataset. This is the first analysis to present cosmological constraints from SPT TT, TE, and EE power spectrum measurements jointly. We blind the cosmological results and subject the dataset to a series of consistency tests at the power spectrum and parameter level. We find excellent agreement between frequencies and spectrum types and our results are robust to the modeling of astrophysical foregrounds. We report results for ΛCDM and a series of extensions, drawing on the following parameters: the amplitude of the gravitational lensing effect on primary power spectra AL, the effective number of neutrino species Neff, the primordial helium abundance YP, and the baryon clumping factor due to primordial magnetic fields b. We find that the SPT-3G 2018 TT/TE/EE data are well fit by ΛCDM with a probability to exceed of 15%. For ΛCDM, we constrain the expansion rate today to H0=68.3±1.5 km s-1 Mpc-1 and the combined structure growth parameter to S8=0.797±0.042. The SPT-based results are effectively independent of Planck, and the cosmological parameter constraints from either dataset are within <1σ of each other. The addition of temperature data to the SPT-3G TE/EE power spectra improves constraints by 8-27% for each of the ΛCDM cosmological parameters. When additionally fitting AL, Neff, or Neff+YP, the posteriors of these parameters tighten by 5-24%. In the case of primordial magnetic fields, complete TT/TE/EE power spectrum measurements are necessary to break the degeneracy between b and ns, the spectral index of primordial density perturbations. We report a 95% confidence upper limit from SPT-3G data of b<1.0. The cosmological constraints in this work are the tightest from SPT primary power spectrum measurements to date and the analysis forms a new framework for future SPT analyses.

SPT-3G is the third survey receiver operating on the South Pole Telescope dedicated to high-resolution observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Sensitive measurements of the temperature and polarization anisotropies of the CMB provide a powerful data set for constraining cosmology. Additionally, CMB surveys with arcminute-scale resolution are capable of detecting galaxy clusters, millimeter-wave bright galaxies, and a variety of transient phenomena. The SPT-3G instrument provides a significant improvement in mapping speed over its predecessors, SPT-SZ and SPTpol. The broadband optics design of the instrument achieves a 430 mm diameter image plane across observing bands of 95, 150, and 220 GHz, with 1.2′ FWHM beam response at 150 GHz. In the receiver, this image plane is populated with 2690 dual-polarization, trichroic pixels ( 1/416,000 detectors) read out using a 68× digital frequency-domain multiplexing readout system. In 2018, SPT-3G began a multiyear survey of 1500 deg2 of the southern sky. We summarize the unique optical, cryogenic, detector, and readout technologies employed in SPT-3G, and we report on the integrated performance of the instrument.

We present constraints on extensions to the ΛCDM cosmological model from measurements of the E-mode polarization autopower spectrum and the temperature-E-mode cross-power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) made using 2018 SPT-3G data. The extensions considered vary the primordial helium abundance, the effective number of relativistic degrees of freedom, the sum of neutrino masses, the relativistic energy density and mass of a sterile neutrino, and the mean spatial curvature. We do not find clear evidence for any of these extensions, from either the SPT-3G 2018 dataset alone or in combination with baryon acoustic oscillation and Planck data. None of these model extensions significantly relax the tension between Hubble-constant, H0, constraints from the CMB and from distance-ladder measurements using Cepheids and supernovae. The addition of the SPT-3G 2018 data to Planck reduces the square-root of the determinants of the parameter covariance matrices by factors of 1.3-2.0 across these models, signaling a substantial reduction in the allowed parameter volume. We also explore CMB-based constraints on H0 from combined SPT, Planck, and ACT DR4 datasets. While individual experiments see some indications of different H0 values between the TT, TE, and EE spectra, the combined H0 constraints are consistent between the three spectra. For the full combined datasets, we report H0=67.49±0.53 km s-1 Mpc-1, which is the tightest constraint on H0 from CMB power spectra to date and in 4.1σ tension with the most precise distance-ladder-based measurement of H0. The SPT-3G survey is planned to continue through at least 2023, with existing maps of combined 2019 and 2020 data already having ∼3.5×lower noise than the maps used in this analysis.