Related papers: Apparent evidence for Hawking points in the CMB Sk…
We examine all-sky cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps on large angular scales to compare their consistency with two scenarios: the standard inflationary quantum picture, and a distribution constrained to have a universal…
Standard inflationary hot big bang cosmology predicts small fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) with isotropic Gaussian statistics. All measurements support the standard theory, except for a few anomalies discovered in the…
In a recent paper, Gurzadyan & Penrose claim to have found directions in the sky around which there are multiple concentric sets of annuli with anomalously low variance in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These features are presented…
We test anisotropic dark energy models with the 7-year WMAP temperature observations data. In the presence of imperfect sources, due to large-scale gradients or anisotropies in the dark energy field, the CMB sky will be distorted…
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…
In the present work, we study the largest structures of the CMB temperature measured by Planck in terms of the most prominent peaks on the sky, which, in particular, are located in the southern galactic hemisphere. Besides these large-scale…
The ellipticity of the anisotropy spots of the Cosmic Microwave Background measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has been studied. We find an average ellipticity of about 2, confirming with a far larger statistics…
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…
We study the large-scale angular correlation signatures of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature fluctuations from WMAP data in several spherical cap regions of the celestial sphere, outside the Kp0 or Kp2 cut-sky masks. We…
We detect a dip of 20-45% in the surface brightness and number counts of NVSS sources smoothed to a few degrees at the location of the WMAP cold spot. The dip has structure on scales of approximately 1-10 degrees. Together with independent…
Several intriguing phenomena, unlikely within the standard inflationary cosmology, were reported in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data from WMAP and appear to be uncorrelated. Two of these phenomena, termed CMB anomalies, are…
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…
New analysis confirms our earlier claim [1], [7] of circles of notably low temperature variance, often in concentric sets, in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), discernable in WMAP data. Their reality can be interpreted as evidence of…
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…
In a concordant $\Lambda$ Cold Dark Matter ($\Lambda$CDM) model, large-angle Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropy due to linear perturbations in the local universe is not negligible. We explore a possible role of an…
Several accurate analyses of the CMB temperature maps from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) have revealed a set of anomalous results, at large angular scales, that appears inconsistent with the statistical isotropy expected…
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…
Statistical Isotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation has been studied and debated extensively in recent years. Under this assumption, the hot spots and cold spots of the CMB are expected to be uniformly distributed over a…
A new analysis of the CMB, using WMAP data, supports earlier indications of non-Gaussian features of concentric circles of low temperature variance. Conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) predicts such features from supermassive black-hole…
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…