Related papers: Cosmological Implications of the CMB Large-scale S…
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 investigate anomalies reported in the Cosmic Microwave Background maps from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite on very large angular scales and discuss possible interpretations. Three independent anomalies involve…
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…
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…
The dipolar model \cite{Gordon:2005ai} has attracted much interest because it may phenomenologically explain the CMB hemispherical power asymmetry found in the WMAP and Planck data. Since such a model explicitly breaks isotropy at large…
We revisit the alignments of the largest structures observed in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) using the seven and nine-year WMAP and first-year Planck data releases. The observed alignments -- the quadrupole with the octopole and…
The low multipoles of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy possess some strange properties like the alignment of the quadrupole and the octopole, and the extreme planarity or the extreme sphericity of some multipoles,…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy power on the largest angular scales observed both by WMAP and COBE DMR appears to be lower than the one predicted by the standard model of cosmology with almost scale free primordial…
On large angular scales (greater than about 60 degrees), the two-point angular correlation function of the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), as measured (outside of the plane of the Galaxy) by the Wilkinson Microwave…
The recent three-year WMAP data have confirmed the anomaly concerning the low quadrupole amplitude compared to the best-fit \Lambda CDM prediction. We show that, allowing the large-scale spatial geometry of our universe to be…
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…
The lack of power at large angular scales in the CMB temperature anisotropy pattern is a feature known to depend on the size of the Galactic mask. Not only the large scale anisotropy power in the CMB is lower than the best-fit $\Lambda$CDM…
Large-scale anomalies have been reported in CMB data with both WMAP and Planck data. These could be due to foreground residuals and or systematic effects, though their confirmation with Planck data suggests they are not due to a problem in…
The connection between the dipolar modulation asymmetry and the quadrupole-octopole alignment in the CMB is studied in this work. First, a generalization of the dipolar modulation model is proposed by considering that the amplitude may…
The angular two-point correlation function of the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), as inferred from nearly all-sky maps, is very close to zero on large angular scales. A statistic invented to quantify this feature,…
The two fundamental assumptions of the standard cosmological model - that the initial fluctuations are statistically isotropic and Gaussian - are rigorously tested using maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy from the…
A previous work (Monteser\'in et al. 2008) estimated the CMB variance from the three-year WMAP data, finding a lower value than expected from Gaussian simulations using the WMAP best-fit cosmological model. We repeat the analysis on the…
We investigate the large scale anomalies in the angular distribution of the cosmic microwave background radiation as measured by WMAP using several tests. These tests, based on the multipole vector expansion, measure correlations between…
The first observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from NASA's \emph{Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe} (WMAP) led to finding `alignment' anomalies not expected from fluctuations in the isotropic cosmological model. We study…
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…