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With the increasing number of experiments dedicated to the observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background, interest on the detailed properties of the foreground Galactic emission has risen. In particular the focus is shifting towards…
We present a method for the computation of the variance of cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps on azimuthally symmetric patches using a fast convolution approach. As an example of the application of the method, we show…
While the observed nearly scale-invariant initial power spectrum is regarded as one of the favorable evidence of the standard inflationary cosmology, precision observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies also suggest…
The blackbody radiation left over from the Big Bang has been transformed by the expansion of the Universe into the nearly isotropic 2.73K Cosmic Microwave Background. Tiny inhomogeneities in the early Universe left their imprint on the…
The cosmic microwave background radiation provides unique constraints on cosmological models. In this Letter we present a summary of the spatial properties of the cosmic microwave background radiation based on the full 4 years of COBE DMR…
At the largest angular scales the presence of a number of unexpected features has been confirmed by the latest measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Among them are the anomalous alignment of the quadrupole and octopole with…
We study inhomogeneities in the distribution of the excursion sets in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature maps obtained by the three years survey of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). At temperature thresholds…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is an abundant source of cosmological information. However, this information is encoded in non-trivial ways in a signal that is difficult to observe. The resulting challenges in extracting this…
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…
The upcoming satellite missions MAP and Planck will measure the spectrum of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background with unprecedented accuracy. We discuss the prospect of using these observations to distinguish among proposed…
We have studied the cosmic microwave background (CMB) map looking for features beyond cosmological isotropy. We began by tiling the CMB variance map (which are produced by different smoothing scales) with stripes of different sizes along…
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…
We study the uniqueness and robustness of acoustic signatures in the cosmic microwave background by allowing for the possibility that they are generated by some as yet unknown source of gravitational perturbations. The acoustic {\it…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB), the relic radiation from the early Universe, offers a unique window into both primordial conditions and the intervening large-scale structure (LSS) it traverses. Interactions between CMB photons and…
Parity-odd non-Gaussianities create a variety of temperature bispectra in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), defined in the domain: $\ell_1 + \ell_2 + \ell_3 = {\rm odd}$. These models are yet unconstrained in the literature, that so…
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…
The extraction of cosmological parameters from microwave background observations relies on specific assumptions about the statistical properties of the data, in particular that the p-point distributions of temperature fluctuations are…
Cosmic microwave background anisotropies provide a vast amount of cosmological information. Their full physical content and detailed structure can be understood in a simple and intuitive fashion through a systematic investigation of the…
Microwave background polarization, though presently undetected, is a fundamental prediction of any viable cosmological model. These lectures review the theoretical description of polarization, its physical interpretation, and potentially…
We present an extensive frequentist analysis of the one-point statistics (number, mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis) and two-point correlation functions determined for the local extrema of the cosmic microwave background temperature…