SIMULATED COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND MAPS AT 0-DEGREES-5 RESOLUTION - UNRESOLVED FEATURES

High-contrast peaks in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy can appear as unresolved sources to observes. We fit simulated CMB maps generated with a cold dark matter model to a set of unresolved features at instrumental resolution 0.5-degrees-1.5-degrees to derive the integral number density per steradian n(>\T\) of features brighter than threshold temperature \T\ and compare the results to recent experiments. A typical medium-scale experiment observing 0.001 sr at 0.5-degrees resolution would expect to observe one feature brighter than 85 muK after convolution with the beam profile, with less than 5% probability to observe a source brighter than 150 muK. Increasing the power-law index of primordial density perturbations n from 1 to 1.5 raises these temperature limits \T\ by a factor of 2. The MSAM features are in agreement with standard cold dark matter models and are not necessarily evidence for processes beyond the standard model.