Related papers: The Real Message in the Sky
Cosmologists have suggested a number of intriguing hypotheses for the origin of the "WMAP cold spot", the coldest extended region seen in the CMB sky, including a very large void and a collapsing texture. Either hypothesis predicts a…
Recent findings of the anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation are confusing for standard cosmology. Remarkably, this fact has been predicted several years ago in the framework of our model of the physical world.…
The physical ingredients to describe the epoch of cosmological recombination are amazingly simple and well-understood. This fact allows us to take into account a very large variety of physical processes, still finding potentially measurable…
Our peculiar motion in a homogeneous and isotropic universe imprints a dipole in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature field and similarly imprints a dipole in the distribution of extragalactic radio sources on the sky. Each of…
Some inconsistencies to the assumption of a cosmological origin of the cosmic microwave background CMB, such as the absence of gravitational lensing in the WMAP data, open the doors to some speculations such as a local origin to the CMB. We…
WMAP observations have accurately determined the position of the first two peaks and dips in the CMB temperature power spectrum. These encode information on the ratio of the distance to the last scattering surface to the sound horizon at…
I briefly review some of the main scientific outputs expected from the upcoming Planck mission. Planck will map the CMB sky with 5' resolution and $\mu$K sensitivity, with minimal foreground contribution and superb control on systematics.…
Recent Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data confirm the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) quadrupole anomaly. We further elaborate our previous proposal that the quadrupole power can be naturally suppressed in axis-symmetric…
In 1965, the discovery of a new type of uniform radiation, located between radiowaves and infrared light, was accidental. Known today as Cosmic Microwave background (CMB), this diffuse radiation is commonly interpreted as a fossil light…
In an intriguing recent paper, Crittenden and Turok proposed cross-correlating the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with tracers of the matter density to probe the existence of a cosmological constant. Here I emphasize that a similar…
The COBE satellite, and the DMR experiment in particular, was extraordinarily successful. However, the DMR results were announced about 7 years ago, during which time a great deal more has been learned about anisotropies in the Cosmic…
This is the obligatory Cosmic Microwave Background review. I discuss the current status of CMB anisotropies, together with some points on the related topic of the Far-Infrared Background. We have already learned a number of important things…
We show how observations of temperature fluctuations in cosmic microwave background (CMB) can be used to extract information related to the large scale structure, including dark matter distribution, pressure and halo velocities involving…
The tremendous experimental progress in cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropy studies over the last few years has helped establish a standard paradigm for cosmology at intermediate epochs and has…
The physical ingredients to describe the epoch of cosmological recombination are amazingly simple and well-understood. This fact allows us to take into account a very large variety of processes, still finding potentially measurable…
For 40 years, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has been the most important source of information about the geometry and contents of the Universe. Even so, only a small fraction of the information available in the CMB has been extracted…
We calculate a signature of cosmic strings in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We find that ionization in the wakes behind moving strings gives rise to extra polarization in a set of rectangular patches in the sky…
We present a novel test of the cosmological principle: the idea that, on sufficiently large scales, the universe should appear homogeneous and isotropic to observers comoving with the Hubble flow. This is a fundamental assumption in modern…
We study the apparent lack of power on large angular scales in the WMAP data. We confirm that although there is no apparent lack of power at large angular scales for the full-sky maps, the lowest multipoles of the WMAP data happen to have…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is the oldest light in the universe. It is seen today as black body radiation at a near-uniform temperature of 2.73K covering the entire sky. This radiation field is not perfectly uniform, but includes…