Related papers: A search for concentric circles in the 7-year WMAP…
The presence of matter in the path of relic photons causes distortions in the angular pattern of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature fluctuations, modifying their properties in a slight but measurable way. Recently, the Planck…
We use high-resolution $N$-body simulations to investigate the optical depth of giant arcs with length-to-width ratio larger than 7.5 and 10 in the `standard' $\LCDM$ model with $\sigma_8=0.9$ and $\Omega_{\rm m,0}=0.3$ and a model based on…
We explore the low-l likelihood of the angular spectrum C(l) of masked CMB temperature maps using an adaptive importance sampler. We find that, in spite of a partial sky coverage, the likelihood distribution of each C(l) closely follows an…
Since this is a meeting on inflation the title of this talk should probably have been ``The cosmos as a lab for inflation''. I will illustrate how, by combining WMAP observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with smaller scales…
We examine the possibility that circles in the cosmic microwave background could be formed by the interaction of a gravitational wave pulse emitted in some pre-big-bang phase of the universe with the last scattering surface. We derive the…
Sky temperature map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is one of the premier probes of cosmology. To minimize instrumentally induced systematic errors, CMB anisotropy experiments measure temperature differences across the sky using…
We stack WMAP 7-year temperature data around extragalactic point sources, showing that the profiles are consistent with WMAP's beam models, in disagreement with the findings of Sawangwit & Shanks (2010). These results require that the…
Atmospheric flows exhibit long-range spatiotemporal correlations manifested as the fractal geometry to the global cloud cover pattern concomitant with inverse power law form for power spectra of temporal fluctuations on all space-time…
Observations show that the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) contains tiny variations at the 10^{-5} level around its black-body equilibrium temperature. The detection of these temperature fluctuations provides to modern Cosmology evidence…
Cosmology and other scientific results from the WMAP mission require an accurate knowledge of the beam patterns in flight. While the degree of beam knowledge for the WMAP one-year and three-year results was unprecedented for a CMB…
We analyze the three-year WMAP temperature anisotropy data seeking to confirm the power spectrum and likelihoods published by the WMAP team. We apply five independent implementations of four algorithms to the power spectrum estimation and…
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…
We search for planar deviations of statistical isotropy in the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data by applying a recently introduced angular-planar statistics both to full-sky and to masked temperature maps, including in our…
Various so-called anomalies have been found in both the WMAP and Planck cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature data that exert a mild tension against the highly successful best-fit 6 parameter cosmological model, potentially…
Although individual observational groups vigorously test their data sets for systematic errors, the pre-WMAP CMB observational data set has not yet been collectively tested. Under the assumption that the concordance model is the correct…
Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) 3-year data confirm the ellipticity of anisotropies of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) maps, found previously for Boomerang and WMAP 1-year high sensitivity maps. The low noise level of the WMAP…
A lack of correlations in the microwave background temperature between sky directions separated by angles larger than 60 degrees has recently been confirmed by data from the Planck satellite. This feature arises as a random occurrence…
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…
The WMAP satellite has completed 3 years of observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation. The 3-year data products include several sets of full sky maps of the Stokes I, Q and U parameters in 5 frequency bands, spanning 23 to…
Spectral distortions of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) offer the possibility of probing processes which occurred during the evolution of our Universe going back up to Z$\simeq 10^7$. Unfortunately all the attempts so far carried out…