Related papers: The Cold Spot as a Large Void: Rees-Sciama effect …
We investigate the impact of spatial variations in the ionized fraction during reionization on temperature anisotropies in the CMB. We combine simulations of large scale structure to describe the underlying density field with an analytic…
Statistical Isotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation has been studied and debated extensively in recent years. Under this assumption, the hot spots and cold spots of the CMB are expected to be uniformly distributed over a…
We present a 2.5 sigma detection of the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect and discuss the constraints it places on cosmological parameters. We cross-correlate microwave temperature maps from the WMAP satellite with a 4000 deg^2 luminous…
As an alternative explanation of the dimming of distant supernovae it has recently been advocated that we live in a special place in the Universe near the centre of a large void described by a Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi (LTB) metric. The…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) bispectrum is a well-known probe of the non-Gaussianity of primordial perturbations. Just as the intervening large-scale structure modifies the CMB angular power spectrum through weak gravitational…
The Universe is not perfectly homogeneous, the large scale structure forms overdense regions and voids. In this paper, we consider the possibility that we occupy a special position in our Universe, close to the center of a local underdense…
We investigate the sources of parity asymmetry in the CMB temperature maps using a pixel domain approach. We demonstrate that this anomaly is mainly associated with the presence of two pairs of high asymmetry regions. The first pair of…
The CMB bispectrum generated by second-order effects at recombination can be calculated analytically when one of the three modes has a wavelength much longer than the other two and is outside the horizon at recombination. This was pointed…
The dimming of Type Ia supernovae could be the result of Hubble-scale inhomogeneity in the matter and spatial curvature, rather than signaling the presence of a dark energy component. A key challenge for such models is to fit the detailed…
Matter inhomogeneities along the line of sight deflect the cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons originating at the last scattering surface at redshift $z \sim 1100$. These distortions modify the pattern of CMB polarization. We identify…
One of the most tantalizing results from the WMAP experiment is the suggestion that the power at large scales is anomalously low when compared to the prediction of the ``standard'' Lambda-CDM model. The same anomaly, although with somewhat…
The observed apparent acceleration of the universe is usually attributed to negative pressure from a mysterious dark energy. This acceleration causes the gravitational potential to decay, heating or cooling photons travelling through crests…
The latest Planck results reconfirm the existence of a slight but chronic tension between the best-fit Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and low-redshift observables: power seems to be consistently lacking in the late universe across a…
In a 15-GHz Ryle-Telescope observation of PC1643+4631 A & B, a pair of quasars at redshifts z = 3.79 and 3.83 separated by 198 arcsec on the sky, we find a decrement in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) of -380 +/- 64 uJy in a 110…
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 small-scale crisis, discrepancies between observations and N-body simulations, may imply suppressed matter fluctuations on subgalactic distance scales. Such a suppression could be caused by some early-universe mechanism (e.g., broken…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature bispectrum is currently the most precise tool for constraining primordial non-Gaussianity (NG). The Planck temperature data tightly constrain the amplitude of local-type NG: $f_{\rm NL}^{\rm…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing power spectrum is a powerful probe of the late-time universe, encoding valuable information about cosmological parameters such as the sum of neutrino masses and dark energy equation of state.…
We investigate if the hemispherical asymmetry in the CMB is produced from "asymmetric" excited initial condition. We show that in the limit where the deviations from the Bunch-Davies vacuum is large and the scale of new physics is maximally…
We explore the signature of a cold dark matter compensated void in the quasi non-linear regime. We find that this void is entirely a cold spot on the microwave background, in contrast to a non-linear void. On the last scattering…