Authors

Abstract

We study the consistency of 150 GHz data from the South Pole Telescope (SPT) and 143 GHz data from the Planck satellite over the 2540 deg2 patch of sky covered by the SPT-SZ survey. We first visually compare the maps and find that the map residuals appear consistent with noise after we account for differences in angular resolution and filtering. To make a more quantitative comparison, we calculate (1) the cross-spectrum between two independent halves of SPT 150 GHz data, (2) the cross-spectrum between two independent halves of Planck 143 GHz data, and (3) the cross-spectrum between SPT 150 GHz and Planck 143 GHz data. We find the three cross-spectra are well-fit (PTE = 0.30) by the null hypothesis in which both experiments have measured the same sky map up to a single free parameter characterizing the relative calibration between the two. As a by-product of this analysis, we improve the calibration of SPT data by nearly an order of magnitude, from 2.6% to 0.3% in power; the best-fit power calibration factor relative to the most recent published SPT calibration is 1.0174 ± 0.0033. Finally, we compare all three cross-spectra to the full-sky Planck 143 × 143 power spectrum and find a hint (∼1.5σ) for differences in the power spectrum of the SPT-SZ footprint and the full-sky power spectrum, which we model and fit as a power law in the spectrum. The best-fit value of this tilt is consistent between the three cross-spectra in the SPT-SZ footprint, implying that the source of this tilt—assuming it is real—is a sample variance fluctuation in the SPT-SZ region relative to the full sky. Despite the precision of our tests, we find no evidence for systematic errors in either data set. The consistency of cosmological parameters derived from these datasets is discussed in a companion paper.