Related papers: Bianchi VII_h models and the cold spot texture

Context. A specific example of Bianchi Type VIIh models, i.e. those including universal rotation (vorticity) and differential expansion (shear), has been shown in Jaffe et al. (2005) to correlate unexpectedly with the WMAP first-year data.…

We analyse a set of new pencil-beam galaxy redshift data in three small regions around the South Galactic Pole (SGP) area. We investigate whether we can find any evidence of the quasi-periodic peaks discovered by Broadhurst et al. (1990) in…

Using available optical and X-ray catalogues of clusters and superclusters of galaxies, we build templates of tSZ emission as they should be detected by the WMAP experiment. We compute the cross-correlation of our templates with WMAP…

We study the Bianchi-I cosmological model motivated by signals of statistical isotropy violation seen in cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations and others. To that end, we consider various kinds of anisotropic matter that source…

The complexity of atmospheric retrieval models is largely data-driven and one-dimensional models have generally been considered adequate with current data quality. However, recent studies have suggested that using 1D models in retrievals…

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) has non-Gaussian features in the temperature fluctuations. An anomalous cold spot surrounded with a hot ring, called the Cold Spot is one of such features. If a large underdence region (supervoid)…

We present local extrema studies of two models that introduce a preferred direction into the observed cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature field. In particular, we make a frequentist comparison of the one- and two-point statistics…

We analyse WMAP 7-year temperature data, jointly modeling the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and Galactic foreground emission. We use the Commander code based on Gibbs sampling. Thus, from the WMAP7 data, we derive simultaneously the CMB…

Measurement of the acoustic peaks of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies has been instrumental in deciding the geometry and content of the universe. Acoustic peak positions vary in different parts of the sky due…

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…

Combining a recent derivation of the CMB evolution equations for homogeneous but anisotropic (Bianchi) cosmologies with an account of the full linearized dynamical freedoms available in such models, I calculate and discuss the various…

We discuss how an extended foreground of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) can account for the anomalies in the low multipoles of the CMB anisotropies. The distortion needed to account for the anomalies is consistent with a cold spot…

(Abridged) Since the discovery of the first directly-imaged, planetary-mass object, 2MASS 1207 b, several works have sought to explain a disparity between its observed temperature and luminosity. Given its known age, distance, and spectral…

We have carried out a redshift survey using the VIMOS spectrograph on the VLT towards the Cosmic Microwave Background cold spot. A possible cause of the cold spot is the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect imprinted by an extremely large void…

We propose an analytic method for predicting the large angle CMBR temperature fluctuations induced by model textures. The model makes use of only a small number of phenomenological parameters which ought to be measured from simple…

The first and third year data releases from the WMAP provide evidence of an anomalous Cold Spot (CS) at galactic latitude b=-57deg and longitude l=209deg. We have examined the properties of the CS in some detail in order to assess its…

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…

The Cosmic Microwave Background provides our most ancient image of the Universe and our best tool for studying its early evolution. Theories of high energy physics predict the formation of various types of topological defects in the very…

We investigate the local properties of WMAP Cold Spot (CS) by defining the local statistics: mean temperature, variance, skewness and kurtosis. We find that, compared with the \emph{coldest spots} in random Gaussian simulations, WMAP CS…

This paper presents multicolor data obtained for a 1.7 square degree region near the South Galactic Pole (patch B) as part of the ESO Imaging Survey (EIS). So far the observations have been conducted in B,V and I but are expected to be…