Related papers: WMAP anomalous signal in the ecliptic plane

Statistical isotropy (SI) has been one of the simplifying assumptions in cosmological model building. Experiments like WMAP and PLANCK are attempting to test this assumption by searching for specific signals in the Cosmic Microwave…

Using the published WMAP 5-year data, we first show how sensitive the WMAP power spectra are to the form of the WMAP beam. It is well known that the beam profile derived from observations of Jupiter is non-Gaussian and indeed extends, in…

Large-scale anomalies have been reported in CMB data with both WMAP and Planck data. These could be due to foreground residuals and or systematic effects, though their confirmation with Planck data suggests they are not due to a problem in…

This paper presents strong observational evidence of numerous previously unobserved anomalous circular spots, of significantly raised temperature, in the CMB sky. The spots have angular radii between 0.03 and 0.04 radians (i.e. angular…

Recently a symmetry-based method to test for statistical isotropy of the cosmic microwave background was developed. We apply the method to template-cleaned 3-year and 5-year WMAP-$DA$ maps. We examine a wide range of angular multipoles from…

We revisit the alignments of the largest structures observed in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) using the seven and nine-year WMAP and first-year Planck data releases. The observed alignments -- the quadrupole with the octopole and…

The spectral variation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as observed by WMAP was tested using foreground reduced WMAP5 data, by producing subtraction maps at the 1$^\circ$ angular resolution between the two cosmological bands of V…

The recent three-year WMAP data have confirmed the anomaly concerning the low quadrupole amplitude compared to the best-fit \Lambda CDM prediction. We show that, allowing the large-scale spatial geometry of our universe to be…

Recent analyses of the WMAP data have suggested that the low-order multipoles of the CMB anisotropy distribution show cosmologically interesting and unexpected morphologies and amplitudes. In this paper, we apply a power equalization (PE)…

A number of studies of WMAP and Planck claimed the low multipole (specially quadrupole) power deficiency in CMB power spectrum. Anomaly in the orientations of the low multipoles have also been claimed. There is a possibility that the power…

[Abridged] We present updated estimates of Galactic foreground emission using seven years of WMAP data. Using the power spectrum of differences between multi-frequency template-cleaned maps, we find no evidence for foreground contamination…

We revisit the anisotropic universe model previously developed by Ackerman, Carroll and Wise (ACW), and generalize both the theoretical and computational framework to include polarization and various forms of systematic effects. We apply…

We apply the recently defined multipole vector framework to the frequency-specific first-year WMAP sky maps, estimating the low-l multipole coefficients from the high-latitude sky by means of a power equalization filter. While most previous…

We report the results of an extragalactic point source search using the 61 and 94 GHz (V- and W-band) temperature maps from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Applying a method that cancels the ``noise'' due to the CMB…

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…

I discuss whether the standard cosmological models fit the WMAP data well enough to justify parameter estimation with standard assumptions. The observed quadrupole is low (but has significant foreground uncertainty) and drives weak evidence…

(Abridged) The 7-year WMAP data and improved astrophysical data rigorously test the standard cosmological model and its extensions. By combining WMAP with the latest distance measurements from BAO and H0 measurement, we determine the…

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…

We detect a dip of 20-45% in the surface brightness and number counts of NVSS sources smoothed to a few degrees at the location of the WMAP cold spot. The dip has structure on scales of approximately 1-10 degrees. Together with independent…

The existing analysis of WMAP data is based on approximations for the likelihood function, which is likely to be inaccurate on large scales. Here we present exact evaluations of the likelihood of the low multipoles by direct inversion of…