Related papers: CCC-predicted low-variance circles in CMB sky and …
We review the recently found large-scale anomalies in the maps of temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. These include alignments of the largest modes of CMB anisotropy with each other and with geometry and direction…
The 21-cm brightness temperature fluctuation from the Dark Ages ($z \simeq 30-100$) will allow us to probe the inflationary epoch on very small scales ($>0.1 \, \mbox{Mpc}^{-1}$), inaccessible to cosmic microwave background experiments.…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum is a powerful cosmological probe as it entails almost all the statistical information of the CMB perturbations. Having access to only one sky, the CMB power spectrum measured by our…
We show that the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect caused by hot electrons in the Local Supercluster (LSC) can explain the abnormal quadrupole and octopole of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that were measured by WMAP and COBE. The…
We study the topology generated by the temperature fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, as quantified by the number of components and holes, formally given by the Betti numbers, in the growing excursion sets. We…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is one of the finest probes of cosmology. Its all-sky temperature and linear polarization (LP) fluctuations have been measured precisely at a level of deltaT/TCMB ~10^{-6}. In comparison, circular…
In addition to simple scale invariance, a universe dominated by dark energy naturally gives rise to correlation functions possessing full conformal invariance. This is due to the mathematical isomorphism between the conformal group of…
CMB full-sky temperature data show a hemispherical asymmetry in power nearly aligned with the Ecliptic. In real space, this anomaly can be quantified by the temperature variance in the northern and southern Ecliptic hemispheres, with the…
Ever refined cosmological measurements have established the $\Lambda$CDM concordance model, with the key cosmological parameters being determined to percent-level precision today. This allows us to make explicit predictions for the spectral…
We investigate the angular two-point correlation function of temperature in the WMAP maps. Updating and extending earlier results, we confirm the lack of correlations outside the Galaxy on angular scales greater than about 60 degrees at a…
The dimming of Type Ia supernovae could be the result of Hubble-scale inhomogeneity in the matter and spatial curvature, rather than signaling the presence of a dark energy component. A key challenge for such models is to fit the detailed…
The spectrum and statistics of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) are investigated under the hypothesis that scale invariance of the primordial density fluctuations should be promoted to full conformal invariance. As in the…
The amplitudes of the quadrupole and octopole measured from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) appear to be lower than expected according to the concordance Lambda CDM cosmology. However, the pseudo-Cl estimator used by the…
A search for matched circle pairs of similar temperature fluctuations in the final WMAP 9yr data is carried out. Such a signature is expected if the space of the Universe is multiply connected. We investigate the relation between the pixel…
We present the temperature power spectra of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) derived from the three seasons of data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) at 148 GHz and 218 GHz, as well as the cross-frequency spectrum between the…
We use very large cosmological N--body simulations to obtain accurate predictions for the two-point correlations and power spectra of mass-limited samples of galaxy clusters. We consider two currently popular cold dark matter (CDM)…
The emergence of several unexpected large-scale features in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has pointed to possible new physics driving the origin of density fluctuations in the early Universe and their evolution into the large-scale…
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…
Microwave background temperature and polarization observations are a powerful way to constrain cosmological parameters if the likelihood function can be calculated accurately. The temperature and polarization fields are correlated, partial…
In this Essay we investigate the observational signatures of Loop Quantum Cosmology (LQC) in the CMB data. First, we concentrate on the dynamics of LQC and we provide the basic cosmological functions. We then obtain the power spectrum of…