Related papers: Is the CMB cold spot a gate to extra dimensions?
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies are thought to be statistically isotropic and Gaussian. However, several anomalies are observed, including the CMB Cold Spot, an unexpected cold $\sim 10^{\circ}$ region with $p$-value…
In a concordant $\Lambda$ Cold Dark Matter ($\Lambda$CDM) model, large-angle Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropy due to linear perturbations in the local universe is not negligible. We explore a possible role of an…
Standard inflationary hot big bang cosmology predicts small fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) with isotropic Gaussian statistics. All measurements support the standard theory, except for a few anomalies discovered in the…
The Cold Spot, with an unusually cold region surrounded by a hot ring, is a statistically significant anomaly in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) sky. In this work we assess whether different sets of multiple subvoids based on the…
Cosmologists have suggested a number of intriguing hypotheses for the origin of the "WMAP cold spot", the coldest extended region seen in the CMB sky, including a very large void and a collapsing texture. Either hypothesis predicts a…
The report of a significant deviation of the CMB temperature anisotropies distribution from Gaussianity (soon after the public release of the WMAP data in 2003) has become one of the most solid WMAP anomalies. This detection grounds on an…
Fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) contain information which has been pivotal in establishing the current cosmological model. These data can also be used to test well-motivated additions to this model, such as cosmic…
One of the most interesting explanations for the non-Gaussian Cold Spot (CS) detected in the WMAP data by Vielva et al. 2004, is that it arises from the interaction of the CMB radiation with a cosmic texture (Cruz et al. 2007b). In this…
Understanding the observed Cold Spot (CS) (temperature of ~ -150 mu K at its centre) on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is an outstanding problem. Explanations vary from assuming it is just a > 3 sigma primordial Gaussian fluctuation…
The non-Gaussian Cold Spot (CS) surrounded by its hot ring is one of the most striking features of the CMB. It has been speculated that either new physics or ISW effect induced by the presence of a cosmic void at high redshift can account…
We present a simple inflationary scenario that can produce arbitrarily large spherical underdense or overdense regions embedded in a standard Lambda cold dark matter paradigm, which we refer to as bubbles. We analyze the effect such bubbles…
CMB photons passing through a collapsing texture knot receive an energy shift, creating characteristic cold and hot spots on the sky. We calculate the anisotropy pattern produced by collapsing texture knots of arbitrary shape. The texture…
We re-analyse the cosmic microwave background (CMB) Cold Spot (CS) anomaly with particular focus on understanding the bias a mask (contaminated by Galactic and point sources) may introduce. We measure the coldest spot, found by applying the…
We discuss the effect of the time evolution of extra dimensions on CMB anisotropies and large-scale structure formation. We study the impact of scalar fields in a low-energy effective description of a general class of brane world models on…
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…
The Cold Spot (CS) is a clear feature in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB); it could be of primordial origin, or caused by a intervening structure along the line of sight. We identified a large projected underdensity in the recently…
A new map of the sky representing the degree of randomness in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature has been obtained. The map based on estimation of the Kolmogorov stochasticity parameter clearly distinguishes the contribution…
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…
Unexpected features have been observed in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature on large scales. We revisit these CMB anomalies using new foreground-cleaned CMB temperature maps derived in a companion paper from WMAP and Planck…
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…