Related papers: Superimposed Oscillations in the WMAP Data?
Recently a symmetry-based method to test for statistical isotropy of the cosmic microwave background was developed. We apply the method to template-cleaned 3-year and 5-year WMAP-$DA$ maps. We examine a wide range of angular multipoles from…
Spectral-line displacements away from the wavelengths naively expected from the Doppler shift caused by stellar radial motion may originate as convective shifts (correlated velocity and brightness patterns in the photosphere), as…
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…
The B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a unique window into tensor perturbations from inflationary gravitational waves. Survey effects complicate the estimation and description of the power spectrum on the…
In many cases, the values of some model parameters are determined by maximising the likelihood of a set of data points given the parameter values. The presence of outliers in the data and correlations between data points complicate this…
I present recent results studying flare emission in magnetars. Strong quasi-periodic oscillations observed in the tail of giant magnetar flares are frequently interpreted as evidence for global seismic oscillations. I demonstrate that such…
We investigate the presence of primordial oscillatory features in measurements of CMB anisotropies through a systematic comparison of phenomenological templates. Building upon previous searches for primordial features using Planck data, we…
The detection of gravitational waves with Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) requires precise measurement of the difference between the pulsars' timing models and their observed pulses, as well as dealing with numerous and sometimes hard to…
The angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropy observed by WMAP has an anomalous dip at l~20 and bump at l~40. One explanation for this structure is the presence of features in the primordial curvature…
The WMAP haze is an excess in the 22 to 93 GHz frequency bands of WMAP extending about 10 degrees from the galactic center. We show that synchrotron emission from electron-positron pairs injected into the interstellar medium by the galactic…
Obscuration due to Galactic emission complicates the extraction of information from cosmological surveys, and requires some combination of the (typically imperfect) modeling and subtraction of foregrounds, or the removal of part of the sky.…
We discuss the possible impact of astrophysical foregrounds on three recent exciting results of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments: the WMAP measurements of the temperature-polarization (TE) correlation power spectrum, the…
The six parameters of the standard $\Lambda$CDM model have best-fit values derived from the Planck temperature power spectrum that are shifted somewhat from the best-fit values derived from WMAP data. These shifts are driven by features in…
We summarize three recent efforts to constrain the first few moments of cosmic creation before and during the epoch of inflation. We consider two means to explain a slight dip in the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background for…
We provide theoretical and experimental evidence of statistical outliers in random laser emission that are not accounted for by the, now established, power-law tailed (L\'evy) distribution. Such outliers manifest themselves as single, large…
Several studies have correlated observations of impulsive solar activity -- flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) -- with the amount of magnetic flux near strong-field polarity inversion lines (PILs) in active regions' photospheric…
Recent WMAP observations indicate that the primordial abundance of lithium should have been 2-4 times higher than the value measured in low-metallicity stars. We show that this discrepancy can be explained by the process of ambipolar…
Extreme events have an important role which is sometime catastrophic in a variety of natural phenomena including climate, earthquakes and turbulence, as well as in man-made environments like financial markets. Statistical analysis and…
We present precise radial-velocity measurements of WASP-1 and WASP-2 throughout transits of their giant planets. Our goal was to detect the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect, the anomalous radial velocity observed during eclipses of rotating…
The low multipole anomalies of the Cosmic Microwave Background has received much attention during the last few years. It is still not ascertained whether these anomalies are indeed primordial or the result of systematics or foregrounds. An…