Related papers: Understanding the WMAP Cold Spot mystery
A non-cosmological origin for the CMB low-order multipoles and associated anomalies is suggested in this paper. We discuss the possibility that these features of the power spectrum originate in the termination shock (TS) region of the…
We reassess the evidence that WMAP temperature maps contain a statistically significant "cold spot" by repeating the analysis using simple circular top-hat (disk) weights, as well as Gaussian weights of varying width. Contrary to previous…
We study the alignments of the low multipoles of CMB anisotropies with specific directions in the sky (i.e. the dipole, the north Ecliptic pole, the north Galactic pole and the north Super Galactic pole). Performing $10^5$ random…
We present a measurement of the gravitational lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and polarization fields obtained by cross-correlating the reconstructed convergence signal from the first season of ACTPol data at…
On large angular scales (greater than about 60 degrees), the two-point angular correlation function of the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), as measured (outside of the plane of the Galaxy) by the Wilkinson Microwave…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) are of great importance for cosmology. In previous work we had developed a pipeline for map-making independently of the WMAP team.…
The statistical expectation values of the temperature fluctuations of cosmic microwave background (CMB) are assumed to be preserved under rotations of the sky. We investigate the statistical isotropy of the CMB anisotropy maps recently…
The non-Gaussian cold spot found in the WMAP data has created controversy about its origin. Here we calculate the Bayesian posterior probability ratios for three different models that could explain the cold spot. A recent work claimed that…
Sky temperature map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is one of the premier probes of cosmology. To minimize instrumentally induced systematic errors, CMB anisotropy experiments measure temperature differences across the sky using…
The coming flood of CMB polarization experiments, spurred by the recent detection of CMB polarization by DASI and WMAP, will be confronted by many new analysis tasks specific to polarization. For the analysis of CMB polarization data sets,…
The CMB polarization is the Everest in the quest to characterize the earliest photons from the Universe. After a long list of ever-decreasing upper limits, a detection of polarization was made in 2002 by the DASI team at ell =~ 500. The…
Measurement of the largest angular scale ($\ell < 30$) features of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization is a powerful way to constrain the optical depth to reionization and search for the signature of inflation through the…
We study the directional dependence of the angular two-point correlation function in maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We propose two new statistics, one which measures the correlation of each point in the sky with a ring of…
The dipolar model \cite{Gordon:2005ai} has attracted much interest because it may phenomenologically explain the CMB hemispherical power asymmetry found in the WMAP and Planck data. Since such a model explicitly breaks isotropy at large…
We present the results of an extragalactic point source search using the five-year WMAP 41, 61 and 94 GHz (Q-, V- and W-band) temperature maps. This work is an extension of our point source search in the WMAP maps applying a CMB-free…
We study the spectral and morphological characteristics of the diffuse Galactic emission in the WMAP temperature data using a template-based multi-linear regression, and obtain the following results. 1. We confirm previous observations of a…
We extend the previously described CMB Gibbs sampling framework to allow for exact Bayesian analysis of anisotropic universe models, and apply this method to the 5-year WMAP temperature observations. This involves adding support for…
In this research, we present an alternative methodology to search for ring-like structures in the sky with unusually large temperature gradients, namely Hawking points (HP), in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which are possible…
We present a new method for constructing maps of the secondary temperature fluctuations imprinted on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation by photons propagating through the evolving cosmic gravitational potential. Large…
High resolution cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments have allowed us to precisely measure the CMB temperature power spectrum down to very small scales (multipole $\ell \sim 3000$). Such measurements at multiple frequencies enable…