Related papers: A comprehensive overview of the Cold Spot

We provide evidence of the detection of a new non-Gaussian anomaly in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation which has larger statistical significance than the Cold Spot (CS) anomaly and comparable size. This temperature anomaly is…

The integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) contribution induced on the cosmic microwave background by the presence of a supervoid as the one detected by Szapudi et al. (2015) is reviewed in this letter in order to check whether it could explain the…

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mapped the distribution of temperature and polarization over the entire sky in five microwave frequency bands. These full-sky maps were used to obtain measurements of temperature and…

All the analyses of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature maps up--to--date show that CMB anisotropies follow a Gaussian distribution. On the other hand, astrophysical foregrounds which hamper the detection of the CMB angular power…

Several unexpected features have been observed in the microwave sky at large angular scales, both by WMAP an by Planck. Among those features is a lack of both variance and correlation on the largest angular scales, alignment of the lowest…

We predict the polarization of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons that results from a cosmic bubble collision. The polarization is purely E-mode, symmetric around the axis pointing towards the collision bubble, and has several…

Analyses of recent cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations have provided increasing indications for the existence of large scale anisotropy in the universe. Given the far reaching consequences of such an anisotropy for our…

Motivated by the success of the Bianchi VII_h model in addressing many of the anomalies observed in the WMAP data (Jaffe et al.), we present calculations in real and in wavelet space of the Higher Criticism statistic of the Bianchi…

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has measured lower amplitudes for the temperature quadrupole and octopole anisotropies than expected in the best fitting (concordance) Lambda-dominated cold dark matter cosmology. Some authors…

We present a search for non-Gaussianity in the WMAP first-year data using the two-point correlation function of maxima and minima in the temperature map. We find evidence for non-Gaussianity on large scales, whose origin appears to be…

We discuss selected large-scale anomalies in the maps of temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Specfically, these include alignments of the largest modes of CMB anisotropy with one another and with the geometry and…

We study the Planck CMB temperature at different scales through its derivatives up to second order, which allows one to characterize the local shape and isotropy of the field. The problem of having an incomplete sky in the calculation and…

We analyse WMAP 7-year temperature data, jointly modeling the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and Galactic foreground emission. We use the Commander code based on Gibbs sampling. Thus, from the WMAP7 data, we derive simultaneously the CMB…

We confirm at the $5.7\sigma$ level previous studies reporting Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperatures being significantly lower around nearby spiral galaxies than expected in the $\Lambda$CDM model. Results from our earlier work was…

The spherical Mexican Hat wavelet is introduced in this paper, with the aim of testing the Gaussianity of the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature fluctuations. Using the information given by the wavelet coefficients at several scales,…

We present interferometric imaging at 33 GHz, with the new superextended configuration of the Very Small Array (VSA), of a very deep decrement in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature. This decrement is located in the direction…

We search for an unusual alignment of the preferred axes of the quadrupole and octopole, the so-called axis of evil, in the CMB temperature and polarization data from WMAP. We use the part of the polarization map which is uncorrelated with…

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 extend the previously described CMB Gibbs sampling framework to allow for exact Bayesian analysis of anisotropic universe models, and apply this method to the 5-year WMAP temperature observations. This involves adding support for…

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…