Related papers: Is the CMB cold spot a gate to extra dimensions?
We discuss selected large-scale anomalies in the maps of temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Specfically, these include alignments of the largest modes of CMB anisotropy with one another and with the geometry and…
We explore the large angular scale temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) due to homogeneous local dust-filled voids in a flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe with a cosmological constant. In comparison with…
The predictions of the inflationary LCDM paradigm match today's high-precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy extremely well. The same data put tight limits on other sources of anisotropy. Cosmic strings are a…
We forecast the detectability of the lensing footprint of a collapsing cosmic texture, a topological defect proposed as an explanation of the CMB Cold Spot. Our pipeline is a quadratic, template-amplitude estimator for localized,…
The divergence of the momentum density field of the large scale structure generates a secondary anisotropy contribution to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). While the effect is best described as a non-linear extension to the well-known…
Several intriguing phenomena, unlikely within the standard inflationary cosmology, were reported in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data from WMAP and appear to be uncorrelated. Two of these phenomena, termed CMB anomalies, are…
Most of the cosmological information extracted from the CMB has been obtained through the power spectrum, however there is much more to be learnt from the statistical distribution of the temperature random field. We review some recent…
We make the observation that a brane universe accelerates through its bulk spacetime, and so may be interpreted as an Unruh observer. The bulk vacuum is perceived to be a thermal bath that heats matter fields on the brane. It is shown that,…
The COBE satellite's maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy do not have the resolution to discriminate between theories of cosmic structure formation based on inflation, and those based on field ordering following a…
The Microwave Anisotropy Probe and Planck missions will provide low noise maps of the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These maps will allow measurement of the power spectrum of the CMB with measurement noise below…
We review the theory of the temperature anisotropy and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and describe what we have learned from current CMB observations. In particular, we discuss how the CMB is being used to…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations provide in principle a high-precision test of models which are motivated by M theory. We set out the framework of a program to compute the tensor anisotropies in the CMB that are generated in…
We study inhomogeneities in the distribution of the excursion sets in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature maps obtained by the three years survey of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). At temperature thresholds…
In both WMAP and Planck observations on the temperature anisotropy of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation a number of large-scale anomalies were discovered in the past years, including the CMB parity asymmetry in the low multipoles.…
Several unexpected features have been observed in the microwave sky at large angular scales, both by WMAP an by Planck. Among those features is a lack of both variance and correlation on the largest angular scales, alignment of the lowest…
We investigate the imprint of nonlinear matter condensations on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) in an $\Omega=1$, Cold Dark Matter (CDM) model universe. Temperature anisotropies are obtained by numerically evolving matter…
The angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies is a good probe to look into the primordial density fluctuations at large scales in the universe. Here we re-examine the angular power spectrum of…
We introduce a new technique to detect the discrete temperature steps that cosmic strings might have left in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy map. The technique provides a validity test on the pattern search of cosmic…
We report briefly on a recent analysis of the texture-induced CMB radiation three-point correlation function of temperature anisotropies as predicted by an analytical model. We specialize our analysis to both large-scales (e.g., for…
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…