Related papers: How Anisotropic is our Universe?
The recent high-quality measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies have presented cosmologists with the possibility of studying the large scale properties of our universe with unprecedented precision. Here I review the…
Observations of the Cosmic Microwave background have provided many of the most powerful constraints we have on cosmology and events in the early universe. The spectrum and isotropy of CBR have long been a pillar of Big Bang models. The…
The theoretical basis for the prediction of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background is very well developed. Very low amplitude density and temperature perturbations produce small gravitational effects, leading to an anisotropy that…
We present a new framework for testing the isotropy of the Universe using cosmic microwave background data, building on the nested-sampling ANICOSMO code. Uniquely, we are able to constrain the scalar, vector and tensor degrees of freedom…
We investigate the effect of dark energy on the limits on the shear anisotropy in spatially homogeneous Bianchi cosmological models obtained from measurements of the temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. We shall…
We combine detections of anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation with observations of inhomogeneity in the large-scale distribution of galaxies to test the predictions of models of cosmological structure formation. This…
The cosmic microwave background anisotropy is sensitive to the slope and amplitude of primordial energy density and gravitational wave fluctuations, the baryon density, the Hubble constant, the cosmological constant, the ionization history,…
In addition to shear and vorticity a homogeneous background may also exhibit anisotropic curvature. Here a class of spacetimes is shown to exist where the anisotropy is solely of the latter type, and the shear-free condition is supported by…
In this talk, I review some recent work on cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in an open universe. I emphasize that the observed CMB anisotropies are still consistent with a low value of $\Omega$, and I address the question of…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies probe the primordial density field at the edge of the observable Universe. There is a limiting precision (``cosmic variance'') with which anisotropies can determine the amplitude of primordial…
We show the existence of spatially homogeneous but anisotropic cosmological models whose cosmic microwave background temperature is exactly isotropic at one instant of time but whose rate of expansion is highly anisotropic. The existence of…
The cosmological principle is a cornerstone of the standard cosmological model. However, recent observations suggest potential deviations from this assumption, hinting at a small anisotropic expansion. Such an expansion can arise from…
A recent paper (Martinez--Gonzalez & Sanz 1995) showed that if the universe is homogeneous but anisotropic, then the small quadrupole anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation implies that the spacetime anisotropy is very…
The study of anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation is progressing at a phenomenal rate, both experimentally and theoretically. These anisotropies can teach us an enormous amount about the way that fluctuations were…
We question the global universe isotropy by probing the alignment of local structures in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The original method proposed relies on a steerable wavelet decomposition of the CMB signal on the…
A cosmological model with anisotropic dark energy is analyzed. The amount of deviation from isotropy of the equation of state of dark energy, the skewness \delta, generates an anisotropization of the large-scale geometry of the Universe,…
Homogeneity is a crucial, but poorly tested, assumption in cosmology. We introduce a new approach which allows us to place limits on the presence of localized structures within essentially our entire observable volume, using cosmic…
We propose a simple technique to detect any anisotropic expansion stage in the history of the universe starting from the inflationary stage to the surface of last scattering from the CMBR data. We use the property that any anisotropic…
We review the physical processes that are thought to produce anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background, focusing primarily (but not exclusively) on the effects of acoustic waves in the early Universe. We attempt throughout to supply an…
We are now beginning to learn detailed information about cosmological parameters from the shapes of the matter and radiation power spectra, together with their relative normalization. As more high quality data are gathered from galaxy…