English

The circles-in-the-sky signature for three spherical universes

Astrophysics 2009-11-11 v1

Abstract

The mysteriously low CMB power on the largest scales might point to a Universe which consists of a multi-connected space. In addition to a suppression of large-scale power, a multi-connected space can be revealed by its circles-in-the-sky signature. In this paper, a detailed search for this signature is carried out for those three homogeneous multi-connected spherical space forms that lead to the smallest large-scale power. A simultaneous search for all occurring paired circles is made using filtered CMB sky maps which enhance the ordinary Sachs-Wolfe contribution. A marginal hint is found for the right-handed Poincare dodecahedron at Omega_tot = 1.015 and for the right-handed binary tetrahedral space at Omega_tot = 1.068. However, due to the complicated noise and foreground structure of the available microwave sky maps, we cannot draw firm conclusions from our findings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0510847,
  title  = {The circles-in-the-sky signature for three spherical universes},
  author = {R. Aurich and S. Lustig and F. Steiner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0510847},
  year   = {2009}
}