Related papers: Galactic Plane image sharpness as a check on cosmi…
The COBE satellite has provided the only comprehensive multi-frequency full-sky observations of the microwave sky available today. Assessment of the observations requires a detailed likelihood analysis to extract the maximum amount of…
The large-angle (low-ell) correlations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) as reported by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) after their first year of observations exhibited statistically significant anomalies compared to…
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) science team has released results from the first year of operation at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point. The maps are consistent with previous observations but have much better sensitivity and…
We build template maps for the polarized Galactic--synchrotron emission on large angular scales (FWHM =~7$^\circ$), in the 20-90 GHz microwave range, by using WMAP data. The method, presented in a recent work, requires a synchrotron total…
The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) is an invaluable probe of the conditions of the early universe. Recent measurements of its spatial anisotropy have allowed accurate determinations of several fundamental cosmological…
Several unexpected features are observed at large angular scales in the CMB temperature anisotropy measurements by both WMAP and Planck. These include the lack of both variance and correlation, alignment of the lowest multipole moments with…
One of the main pillars of the {\Lambda}CDM model is the Cosmological Principle, which states that our Universe is statistically isotropic and homogeneous on large scales. Here we test this hypothesis using the Astrophysical Gravitational…
We report the results from the second flight of QMAP, an experiment to map the cosmic microwave background near the North Celestial Pole. We present maps of the sky at 31 and 42 GHz as well as a measurement of the angular power spectrum…
We present for the first time a coherent model of the polarized Galactic synchrotron and thermal dust emissions which are the main diffuse foreground for the measurement of the polarized power spectra of the CMB fluctuations with the Planck…
We present measurements of the clustering of hot and cold patches in the microwave background sky as measured from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) five-year data. These measurements are compared with theoretical predictions…
A linear modulation of the primordial perturbations is proposed as an explanation for the observed asymmetry between the northern and southern hemispheres of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data. A cut sky, reduced…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) consists of photons that were last created about 2 months after the Big Bang, and last scattered about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The spectrum of the CMB is very close to a blackbody at 2.725 K…
A fundamental assumption in cosmology is that of statistical isotropy - that the universe, on average, looks the same in every direction in the sky. Statistical isotropy has recently been tested stringently using Cosmic Microwave Background…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) traveled the cosmos long before it reached our telescopes today. Consequently, it is one of the best probes of fundamental processes in the early Universe that we could hope to observe. The cosmological…
We point out that the recent WMAP findings of a suppressed large scale power in the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy power spectrum, if of cosmological origin, make the case for a new cosmic coincidence problem.The observed…
We review the present status of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy observations and discuss the main related astrophysical issues, instrumental effects and data analysis techniques. We summarise the balloon-borne and ground-based…
The information theory approach is suggested to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) problem for negatively curved homogeneous and isotropic Universe. Namely, the Kolmogorov complexity of anisotropy of spots in CMB sky maps is proposed as…
We introduce a new formalism to describe the polarization signal of galaxy clusters on the whole sky. We show that a sparsely sampled, half-sky map of the cluster polarization signal at $z\sim 1$ would allow to better characterize the very…
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…
We perform a detailed comparison of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropy with the predictions of quintessence cosmological models of…