SIMBAD references

A statistical characterization of the Galactic dust emission as observed in the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) maps of Schlegel and colleagues is provided by the continuous wavelet transform. The wavelet coefficients of the dust emission have highly non-Gaussian marginal densities, as quantified by their skewness and kurtosis. An information theoretic measure of the distinguishability of the IRAS maps and random phase realizations is also investigated and found to give a highly significant detection of non-Gaussianity. The efficiency of these wavelet-based statistics is quantified by the rate at which the detection of non-Gaussianity is lost as a function of the fraction of phases randomized. The statistics considered here can be used to test for residual dust emission in maps of the cosmic microwave background, or to test for non-Gaussianity of a spatially localized nature.