Cosmic microwave background polarization data and galactic foregrounds: estimation of cosmological parameters

Abstract

We estimate the accuracy with which various cosmological parameters can be determined from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization data when various galactic unpolarized and polarized foregrounds are included and marginalized using the multi-frequency Wiener filtering technique. We use the specifications of the future CMB missions MAP and Planck for our study. Our results are in qualitative agreement with earlier results obtained without foregrounds, though the errors in most parameters are higher because of degradation of the extraction of polarization signal in the presence of foregrounds.