Related papers: Local Pancake Defeats Axis of Evil

We study the directional dependence of the angular two-point correlation function in maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We propose two new statistics, one which measures the correlation of each point in the sky with a ring of…

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,…

Breakdown of rotational invariance of the primordial power spectrum manifests in the statistical anisotropy of the observed Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. Hemispherical power asymmetry in the CMB may be caused due to a dipolar…

The lack of power anomaly is an intriguing feature at the largest angular scales of the CMB anisotropy temperature pattern, whose statistical significance is not strong enough to claim any new physics beyond the standard cosmological model.…

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…

Parity violation in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation has been confirmed by recent Planck observation. In this paper, we extend our previous work [P. Naselsky et al. Astrophys. J. {\bf 749}, 31 (2012)] on the directional…

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…

The CMB angular temperature fluctuations observed by COBE and WMAP enable us to place a lower limit on the spectral distortions of the CMB at any angular scale. These distortions are connected with the simple fact, that the superposition of…

We discuss how an extended foreground of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) can account for the anomalies in the low multipoles of the CMB anisotropies. The distortion needed to account for the anomalies is consistent with a cold spot…

In this article we propose a novel test for statistical anisotropy of the CMB. The test is based on the fact, that the Galactic foregrounds have a remarcably strong symmetry with respect to their antipodal points and with respect to the…

Analyses of recent cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations have provided increasing indications for the existence of large scale anisotropy in the universe. Given the far reaching consequences of such an anisotropy for our…

There is currently a debate over the existence of claimed statistical anomalies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), recently confirmed in Planck data. Recent work has focussed on methods for measuring statistical significance, on…

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…

We have investigated the angular correlation in the recent CMB data. In addition to the known large-angle correlation anomaly, we find the lack of correlation at small angles with high statistical significance. We have investigated various…

The first and third year data releases from the WMAP provide evidence of an anomalous Cold Spot (CS) at galactic latitude b=-57deg and longitude l=209deg. We have examined the properties of the CS in some detail in order to assess its…

We show that the popular ILC approach is unstable in respect to the division of the sample of map pixels to the set of ``homogeneous'' subsamples. For suitable choice of such subsamples we can obtain the restored CMB signal with amplitudes…

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 are in motion against the cosmic backdrop. This motion is evidenced by the systematic temperature shift - or dipole anisotropy - observed in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB). Because of the Doppler effect, the temperature…

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…

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…