Bayesian decomposition of the Galactic multi-frequency sky using probabilistic autoencoders

Abstract

All-sky observations of the Milky Way show both Galactic and non-Galactic diffuse emission, for example from interstellar matter or the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The different emitters are partly superimposed in the measurements, partly they obscure each other, and sometimes they dominate within a certain spectral range. The decomposition of the underlying radiative components from spectral data is a signal reconstruction problem and often associated with detailed physical modeling and substantial computational effort. We aim to build an effective and self-instructing algorithm detecting the essential spectral information contained Galactic all-sky data covering spectral bands from $\gamma$-ray to radio waves. Utilizing principles from information theory, we develop a state-of-the-art variational autoencoder specialized on the adaption to Gaussian noise statistics. We first derive a generic generative process that leads from a low-dimensional set of emission features to the observed high-dimensional data. We formulate a posterior distribution of these features using Bayesian methods and approximate this posterior with variational inference. The algorithm efficiently encodes the information of 35 Galactic emission data sets in ten latent feature maps. These contain the essential information required to reconstruct the initial data with high fidelity and are ranked by the algorithm according to their significance for data regeneration. The three most significant feature maps encode astrophysical components: (1) The dense interstellar medium (ISM), (2) the hot and dilute regions of the ISM and (3) the CMB. The machine-assisted and data-driven dimensionality reduction of spectral data is able to uncover the physical features encoding the input data. Our algorithm is able to extract the dense and dilute Galactic regions, as well as the CMB, from the sky brightness values only.