A Note on the large-angle anisotropies in the WMAP cut-sky maps
Jun, 200710 pages
Part of Proceedings, 2nd International Workshop on Astronomy and Relativistic Astrophysics (IWARA 2005) : Natal, Brazil, October 2-5, 2005, 411-420
Published in:
- Int.J.Mod.Phys.D 16 (2007) 411-420
e-Print:
- 0706.0575 [astro-ph]
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Abstract: (arXiv)
Recent analyses of the WMAP data seem to indicate the possible presence of large-angle anisotropy in the Universe. If confirmed, these can have important consequences for our understanding of the Universe. A number of attempts have recently been made to establish the reality and nature of such anisotropies in the CMB data. Among these is a directional indicator recently proposed by the authors. A distinctive feature of this indicator is that it can be used to generate a sky map of the large-scale anisotropies of the CMB maps. Applying this indicator to full-sky temperature maps we found a statistically significant preferred direction. The full-sky maps used in these analyses are known to have residual foreground contamination as well as complicated noise properties. Thus, here we performed the same analysis for a map where regions with high foreground contamination were removed. We find that the main feature of the full-sky analysis, namely the presence of a significant axis of asymmetry, is robust with respect to this masking procedure. Other subtler anomalies of the full-sky are on the other hand no longer present.- Observational cosmology
- cosmic microwave background
- large-scale anisotropies in CMB
- large-angle anomalies in CMB
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