Related papers: Giant Rings in the CMB Sky
Inflationary models that involve bursts of particle production generate bump-like features in the primordial power spectrum of density perturbations. These features influence the evolution of density fluctuations, leaving their unique…
The standard model of cosmology with nearly Gaussian, isotropic, scale invariant and adiabatic initial conditions describes the cosmological observations well. However, the study of any deviation from the mentioned conditions will open up a…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which permeates the entire Universe, is the radiation left over from just 380,000 years after the Big Bang. On very large scales, the CMB radiation field is smooth and isotropic, but the existence of…
It is well known that observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are highly sensitive to the spatial curvature of the Universe, k. Here we find that what is in fact being tightly constrained by small angle fluctuations is spatial…
The dipole anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) has given a peculiar velocity vector 370 km s$^{-1}$ along $l=264^\circ,b=48^\circ$. However, some other dipoles, for instance, from the number counts, sky brightness…
Recent announcements that the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) - the faint remnant of the Big Bang - is polarized have caused a stir among cosmologists. Such polarization has long been predicted but could not be detected, until the recent…
The late infall of cold dark matter onto our galaxy produces discrete flows and caustics in its halo. The recently discovered ring of stars near galactocentric distance 20 kpc and a series of sharp rises in the Milky Way rotation curve are…
Multiply connected space sections of the universe on a scale smaller than the horizon size can leave an imprint on cosmic microwave background polarization maps, in such a way that the so-called ``circles-in-the-sky'' method can be used to…
The standard cosmological model predicts statistically isotropic cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations characterized by the CMB temperature coefficients $a_{\ell m}$ being independent Gaussian random variables with zero mean and…
We study the effect of global topology of the spatial geometry on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) for closed flat and closed hyperbolic models in which the spatial hypersurface is multiply connected. If the CMB temperature…
Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more recently, polarization have played a very important role in cosmology. Besides precise determination of various parameters of the `standard' cosmological model, observations have also established…
It has been argued recently that the galaxy peculiar velocity field provides evidence of excessive power on scales of $50\hmpc$, which seems to be inconsistent with the standard $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model. We discuss several…
The curl-modes of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization probe horizon-scale primordial gravitational waves related to inflation. A significant source of confusion is expected from a lensing conversion of polarization related to…
Accurate estimation of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) angular power spectrum is enticing due to the prospect for precision cosmology it presents. Galactic foreground emissions, however, contaminate the CMB signal and need to be…
In this research, we present an alternative methodology to search for ring-like structures in the sky with unusually large temperature gradients, namely Hawking points (HP), in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which are possible…
Inflation provides a unified paradigm for understanding the isotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the flatness problem, and the origin of large-scale structure. Although the physics responsible for inflation is not yet well…
Throughout the Milky Way, molecular clouds typically appear filamentary, and mounting evidence indicates that this morphology plays an important role in star formation. What is not known is to what extent the dense filaments most closely…
It is well known that processes of first order phase transitions may have occurred in the inflationary era. If one or more occurred well before the end of inflation, the nucleated bubbles are stretched to large scales and the primordial…
I address the following issues: All bulk velocity measurements (but one) are consistent with our standard gravitational instability theory. New accurate data and reconstruction methods allow high-resolution dynamical analysis nearby,…
To determine the nature of the recently discovered, ring-like stellar structure at the Galactic anticenter, we have collected spectra of a set of presumed constituent M giants selected from the 2MASS point source catalog. Radial velocities…