Related papers: Understanding the WMAP Cold Spot mystery
We study the angular distribution of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to probe the statistical isotropy of the universe by using precise full-sky CMB data with a model-independent approach. We investigated…
Context. The existence of a maximum correlation angle ($\theta_{max} \gtrsim 60^{\circ}$) in the two-point angular temperature correlations of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, measured by WMAP and Planck, stands in sharp…
Clusters of galaxies produce negative features at wavelengths $\lambda > 1.25$ mm in CMB maps, by means of the thermal SZ effect, while point radio sources produce positive peaks. This fact implies that a distribution of unresolved SZ…
We continue investigation of the hidden plane-mirror symmetry in the distribution of excursion sets in cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropy maps, previously noticed in the three-year data of the Wilkinson microwave…
We present a cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing map produced from a linear combination of South Pole Telescope (SPT) and \emph{Planck} temperature data. The 150 GHz temperature data from the $2500\ {\rm deg}^{2}$ SPT-SZ survey is…
We search for an unusual alignment of the preferred axes of the quadrupole and octopole, the so-called axis of evil, in the CMB temperature and polarization data from WMAP. We use the part of the polarization map which is uncorrelated with…
The largest fluctuation in the CMB sky is the CMB dipole, which is believed to be caused by the motion of our observation frame with respect to the CMB rest frame. This motion accounts for the known motion of the Solar System barycentre…
We investigate large-angle scale temperature anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data and model the large-angle anomalies as the effect of the CMB quadrupole anisotropies…
The anomaly in the Cosmic Microwave Background known as the "Cold Spot" could be due to the existence of an anomalously large spherical (few hundreds Mpc/h radius) underdense region, called a "Void" for short. Such a structure would have an…
This paper reviews the application of a novel methodology for analysing the isotropy of the universe by probing the alignment of local structures in the CMB. The strength of the proposed methodology relies on the steerable wavelet filtering…
Recent analyses of the WMAP data seem to indicate the possible presence of large-angle anisotropy in the Universe. If confirmed, these can have important consequences for our understanding of the Universe. A number of attempts have recently…
Repeated studies of the CMB based on WMAP data have revealed an apparent asymmetry in the distribution of temperature fluctuations over the celestial sphere. The studies indicate that the amplitudes of temperature fluctuations are higher in…
We have studied the cosmic microwave background (CMB) map looking for features beyond cosmological isotropy. We began by tiling the CMB variance map (which are produced by different smoothing scales) with stripes of different sizes along…
We present interferometric imaging at 33 GHz, with the new superextended configuration of the Very Small Array (VSA), of a very deep decrement in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature. This decrement is located in the direction…
The CMB has distinct peaks in both its temperature angular power spectrum (TT) and temperature-polarization cross-power spectrum (TE). From the WMAP data we find the first peak in the temperature spectrum at l = 220.1 +- 0.8 with an…
We show that the popular ILC approach is unstable in respect to the division of the sample of map pixels to the set of ``homogeneous'' subsamples. For suitable choice of such subsamples we can obtain the restored CMB signal with amplitudes…
We present a careful frequentist analysis of one- and two-point statistics of the hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data obtained by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Our main result is the detection…
Using a Gibbs sampling algorithm for joint CMB estimation and component separation, we compute the large-scale CMB and foreground posteriors of the 3-yr WMAP temperature data. Our parametric data model includes the cosmological CMB signal…
The ellipticity of the anisotropy spots of the Cosmic Microwave Background measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has been studied. We find an average ellipticity of about 2, confirming with a far larger statistics…
We perform a wavelet analysis of the temperature and polarization maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) delivered by the WMAP experiment in search for a parity violating signal. Such a signal could be seeded by new physics beyond…