Related papers: CMB Lensing and the WMAP Cold Spot
We continue investigation of the hidden plane-mirror symmetry in the distribution of excursion sets in cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropy maps, previously noticed in the three-year data of the Wilkinson microwave…
We search for hidden mirror symmetries at large angular scales in the WMAP 7 year Internal Linear Combination map of CMB temperature anisotropies using global pixel based estimators introduced for this aim. Two different axes are found for…
Joint analyses of cross-correlations between measurements of galaxy positions, galaxy lensing, and lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) offer powerful constraints on the large-scale structure of the Universe. In a forthcoming…
Single-field inflation, arguably the simplest and most compelling paradigm for the origin of our Universe, is strongly supported by the recent results of the Planck satellite and the BICEP2 experiment. The results from Planck, however, also…
We study the apparent lack of power on large angular scales in the WMAP data. We confirm that although there is no apparent lack of power at large angular scales for the full-sky maps, the lowest multipoles of the WMAP data happen to have…
The lack of large-angle correlations in the observed microwave background temperature fluctuations persists in the final-year maps from WMAP and the first cosmological data release from Planck. We find a statistically robust and significant…
The recent determination of the dark matter density in the Universe by the WMAP satellite has brought new attention to the interplay of results from particle physics experiments at accelerators and from cosmology. In this paper we discuss…
We studied the WMAP temperature anisotropy data using two different methods. The derived signal gradient maps show regions with low mean gradients in structures near the ecliptic poles and higher gradient values in the wide ecliptic…
With polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) now detected, and confirmed by several independent experiments, the next goal is to characterise accurately its statistical properties. In these lecture notes we review the physical…
We have studied the cosmic microwave background (CMB) map looking for features beyond cosmological isotropy. We began by tiling the CMB variance map (which are produced by different smoothing scales) with stripes of different sizes along…
We study the observational constraints of CMB temperature and polarization anisotropies on models of dark energy, with special focus on models with variation in properties of dark energy with time. We demonstrate that the key constraint…
Baryons constitute about 4% of our universe, but most of them are missing and we do not know where and in what form they are hidden. This constitute the so-called missing baryon problem. A possibility is that part of these baryons are…
We explore the microwave anisotropies at large angular scales produced by the emission from cold and large dust grains, expected to exist in the outer parts of the Solar System, using a simple toy model for this diuse emission. Its…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) provides a precious window on fundamental physics at very high energy scales, possibly including quantum gravity, GUTs and supersymmetry. The CMB has already enabled defect-based rivals to inflation to…
We have studied the implications of the new generation of CMB spectrum space experiments for our knowledge of the thermal history of the Universe. The combination of two experiments with the sensitivity and the frequency coverage jointly…
The origin of power asymmetry and other measures of statistical anisotropy on the largest scales of the universe, as manifested in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and large-scale structure data, is a long-standing open question in…
Cosmic Microwave Background satellite missions as the on-going Planck experiment are expected to provide the strongest constraints on a wide set of cosmological parameters. Those constraints, however, could be weakened when the assumption…
We cross correlate the large-scale cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky measured by WMAP with two probes of large-scale structure at z ~ 1. The hard X-ray background, measured by the HEAO-1 satellite, is positively correlated with the WMAP…
Peculiar velocities encode rich cosmological information, but their transverse components are hard to measure. Here, we present the first observations of a novel effect of transverse velocities: the dipole signatures that they imprint on…
The 2.725 K cosmic microwave background has played a key role in the development of modern cosmology by providing a solid observational foundation for constraining possible theories of what happened at very large redshifts and theoretical…