Related papers: The axis of evil
In the standard framework of cosmology, primordial density fluctuations are assumed to have an isotropic Gaussian distribution. We search for deviations from this assumption in the WMAP data for the low $l$ modes of Cosmic Microwave…
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…
In both WMAP and Planck observations on the temperature anisotropy of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation a number of large-scale anomalies were discovered in the past years, including the CMB parity asymmetry in the low multipoles.…
Among the biggest surprises revealed by COBE and confirmed by WMAP measurements of the temperature anisotropy of the CMB are the anomalous features in the 2-point angular correlation function on very large angular scales. In particular, the…
We search for an unusual alignment of the preferred axes of the quadrupole and octopole, the so-called axis of evil, in the CMB temperature and polarization data from WMAP. We use the part of the polarization map which is uncorrelated with…
In light of the three-year data release from WMAP we re-examine the evidence for the ``Axis of Evil'' (AOE). We discover that previous statistics are not robust with respect to the data-sets available and different treatments of the…
We investigate the point-parity and mirror-parity handedness of the large angle anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In particular we consider whether the observed low CMB quadrupole could more generally signal odd…
Low multipoles ($l$) in cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies have shown some `peculiarities' when examined since the release of the full sky CMB maps, using a variety of tests. In this paper, we concern ourselves with…
The magnetic field in our Galaxy is not well known and is difficult to measure. A spiral regular field in the disk between the Galactic arms is favored by observations, however it is still controversial if the field reverses from arm to…
We study the alignments of the low multipoles of CMB anisotropies with specific directions in the sky (i.e. the dipole, the north Ecliptic pole, the north Galactic pole and the north Super Galactic pole). Performing $10^5$ random…
The arrival directions of Galactic cosmic rays exhibit anisotropies up to the level of one per-mille over various angular scales. Recent observations of TeV-PeV cosmic rays show that the dipole anisotropy has a strong energy dependence with…
We have investigated non-Gaussianity of our early Universe by comparing the parity asymmetry of the WMAP power spectrum with simulations. We find that odd-parity preference of the WMAP data (2<= l <=18) is anomalous at 4-in-1000 level. We…
We report a systematic rotation of the plane of polarization of electromagnetic radiation propagating over cosmological distances. The effect is extracted independently from Faraday rotation, and found to be correlated with the angular…
Recent astronomical observations show that the universe may be anisotropic on large scales. The Union2 SnIa data hint that the universe has a preferred direction. If such a cosmological privileged axis indeed exists, one has to consider an…
A recent study of the rotation of the plane of polarization of light from 160 cosmological sources claims to find significant evidence for cosmological anisotropy. We point out methodological weaknesses of that study, and reanalyze the same…
The foundation of modern cosmology relies on the so-called cosmological principle which states an homogeneous and isotropic distribution of matter in the universe on large scales. However, recent observations, such as the temperature…
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 compare the statistics of parity even and odd multipoles of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky from PLANCK full mission temperature measurements. An excess power in odd multipoles compared to even multipoles has previously been…
We propose a novel representation of cosmic microwave anisotropy maps, where each multipole order l is represented by l unit vectors pointing in directions on the sky and an overall magnitude. These "multipole vectors and scalars" transform…
Radiation traversing the observable universe provides powerful ways to probe anisotropy of electromagnetic propagation. A controversial recent study claimed a signal of dipole character. Here we test a new and independent data set of 361…