我们提出了一个广泛的频率论分析的一点统计（数量，平均值，方差，偏度和峰度）和两点关联函数确定的局部极值的宇宙微波背景温度场观察五年的威尔金森微波各向异性探测器（WMAP）的数据。应用一点统计的假设检验表明，在所有频段的WMAP数据的热点和冷点的低方差。在95%C. L.条件下，观测与最佳拟合宇宙学模型的高斯模拟的一致性被拒绝。在WMAP KQ 75掩模和银河系和黄道坐标系中的北半球之外。我们证明，这是不可能的，剩余的银河前景排放有助于观察到的非高斯性。然而，高通滤波器的应用，消除了大的角尺度功率确实提高了与最佳拟合宇宙学模型的一致性。计算了温度对乘积（T-T）和空间对计数（P-P）的局部极值的两点关联函数。T-T观测结果表明，在20度以下的尺度上存在弱相关性，并且一旦将各种温度阈值应用于KQ 75掩模和北方天空分区确定的极值，则完全低于较低的3-sigma置信区域。P-P相关结构对应于温度极值的聚类特性，并提供证据表明，它是大的角尺度结构，其一些不寻常的属性，是密切相关的热点和冷点在WMAP的五年数据中观察到的属性。
英文摘要：
We present an extensive frequentist analysis of the one-point statistics (number, mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis) and two-point correlation functions determined for the local extrema of the cosmic microwave background temperature field observed in five-years of Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data. Application of a hypothesis test on the one-point statistics indicates a low-variance of hot and cold spots in all frequency bands of the WMAP data. The consistency of the observations with Gaussian simulations of the the best-fitting cosmological model is rejected at the 95% C.L. outside the WMAP KQ75 mask and the northern hemispheres in the Galactic and ecliptic coordinate frames. We demonstrate that it is unlikely that residual Galactic foreground emission contributes to the observed non-Gaussianities. However, the application of a high-pass filter that removes large angular scale power does improve the consistency with the best-fitting cosmological model. Two-point correlation functions of the local extrema are calculated for both the temperature pair product (T-T) and spatial pair-counting (P-P). The T-T observations demonstrate weak correlation on scales below 20 degree and lie completely below the lower 3-sigma confidence region once various temperature thresholds are applied to the extrema determined for the KQ75 mask and northern sky partitions. The P-P correlation structure corresponds to the clustering properties of the temperature extrema, and provides evidence that it is the large angular-scale structures, and some unusual properties thereof, that are intimately connected to the properties of the hot and cold-spots observed in the WMAP five-year data.
The recent paper by Berntsen and Hansen devoted to the analysis of elliptic-ity of anisotropies in CMB maps, distorts some statements of previous studies, misses relevant papers, along with superficial comparison of the results (in part of definitions, the role of noise, angular resolution, model parameters).
Both WMAP and PLANCK missions reported the extremely Cold Spot (CS) centered at Galactic coordinate ($l=209^{\circ}$, $b=-57^{\circ}$) in CMB map. In this paper, we study the local non-Gaussianity of CS by defining the local Minkowski functions. We find that the third Minkowski function $ν_2$ is quite sensitive to the non-Gaussianity caused by CS. Compared with the random Gaussian simulations, WMAP CS deviates from Gaussianity at more than 99% confident level at the scale $R\sim10^{\circ}$. Meanwhile, we find that cosmic texture provides an excellent explanation for these anomalies related to …
We report the results of the 2dF-VST ATLAS Cold Spot galaxy redshift survey (2CSz) based on imaging from VST ATLAS and spectroscopy from 2dF AAOmega over the core of the CMB Cold Spot. We sparsely surveyed the inner 5$^{\circ}$ radius of the Cold Spot to a limit of $i_{AB} \le 19.2$, sampling $\sim7000$ galaxies at $z<0.4$. We have found voids at $z=$ 0.14, 0.26 and 0.30 but they are interspersed with small over-densities and the scale of these voids is insufficient to explain the Cold Spot through the $Λ$CDM ISW effect. Combining with previous data out to $z\sim1$, we conclude that the CMB Co…
我们利用VIMOS光谱仪对宇宙微波背景冷点进行了红移测量。冷斑的一个可能原因是在中等或低红移处由一个非常大的空隙（线性尺寸为数百Mpc）所压印的综合萨克斯-沃尔夫效应。如果<1 emission-line galaxies drawn from an I-band flux limited sample of galaxies in the direction of the cold spot shows no evidence of a gap on scales of Delta-z>在0.35<z<1处存在这样一个空洞，那么红移分布超过700 z 0.05。在较小尺度（Δ z ~0.01）上的红移分布中存在波谷，表明较小尺度的空洞可以连接朝向冷点分离几度的区域。将这种分布与从VVDS调查的宽间隔点中提取的类似大小的子样本所产生的分布进行比较，并不表明朝向冷点的红移分布是异常的，或者这些小间隙可以唯一地归因于真实的空洞。
Recently Finelli et al. [http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1555] found evidence for a relatively nearby (z = 0.16) void in a galaxy catalogue in the direction of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) Cold Spot. Using a perturbative calculation, they also claimed that such a void would produce a CMB decrement comparable to that of the observed Cold Spot, mainly via the nonlinear Rees-Sciama effect. Here I calculate the effect of such a void using a fully general relativistic model and show that, to the contrary, the linear integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect dominates and produces a substantially weaker decr…
The three-dimensional gravitational velocity field within z~0.1 has been modeled with the Wiener filter methodology applied to the Cosmicflows-3 compilation of galaxy distances. The dominant features are a basin of attraction and two basins of repulsion. The major basin of attraction is an extension of the Shapley concentration of galaxies. One basin of repulsion, the Dipole Repeller, is located near the anti-apex of the cosmic microwave background dipole. The other basin of repulsion is in the proximate direction toward the 'Cold Spot' irregularity in the cosmic microwave background. It has b…
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 2-sphere. We use the orientation matrix, first proposed by Watson (1965) and Scheidegger (1965) and associated shape and strength parameters (Woodcock, 1977) to analyse whether the hot and cold spots of the observed CMB temperature anisotropy field are uniformly placed. We demonstrate the usefulness of our estimators by using simulated toy models containing…
The discovery of a void of size $\sim200\;h^{-1}$Mpc and average density contrast of $\sim-0.1$ aligned with the Cold Spot direction has been recently reported. It has been argued that, although the first-order integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect of such a void on the CMB is small, the second-order Rees-Sciama (RS) contribution exceeds this by an order of magnitude and can entirely explain the observed Cold Spot temperature profile. In this paper we examine this surprising claim using both an exact calculation with the spherically symmetric Lemaître-Tolman-Bondi metric, and perturbation theory…
Galaxy angular-power spectrum and autocorrelation functions (ACFs) provide information about the distribution of matter by using galaxy counts as a proxy. In this study, we are going to estimate autocorrelation angular power spectrum and angular autocorrelation function for EMU-ASKAP 5 sigma sources and then compare them with results from NVSS. We will also use SUMSS data to compare ACF results using Landy-Szalay estimator. EMU-ASKAP will provide excellent opportunity to observe universe with high sensitivity and is likely going to observe millions of high redshift sources which will help in s…
Measurement of the acoustic peaks of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies has been instrumental in deciding the geometry and content of the universe. Acoustic peak positions vary in different parts of the sky due to statistical fluctuation. We present the statistics of the peak positions of small patches from ESA Planck data. We found that the peak positions have significantly high variance compared to the 100 CMB simulations with best-fit LambdaCDM model with lensing and Doppler boosting effects included. Examining individual patches, we found the one containing the …
This paper presents strong observational evidence of numerous previously unobserved anomalous circular spots, of significantly raised temperature, in the CMB sky. The spots have angular radii between 0.03 and 0.04 radians (i.e. angular diameters between about 3 and 4 degrees). There is a clear cut-off at that size, indicating that each anomalous spot would have originated from a highly energetic point-like source, located at the end of inflation -- or else point-like at the conformally expanded Big Bang, if it is considered that there was no inflationary phase. The significant presence of thes…
The integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) contribution induced on the cosmic microwave background by the presence of a supervoid as the one detected by Szapudi et al. (2015) is reviewed in this letter in order to check whether it could explain the Cold Spot (CS) anomaly. Two different models, previously used for the same purpose, are considered to describe the matter density profile of the void: a top hat function and a compensated profile produced by a Gaussian potential. The analysis shows that, even enabling ellipticity changes or different values for the dark-energy equation of state parameter $ω$,…
The standard cosmological paradigm narrates a reassuring story of a universe currently dominated by an enigmatic dark energy component. Disquietingly, its universal explaining power has recently been challenged by, above all, the $\sim4σ$ tension in the values of the Hubble constant. Another, less studied anomaly is the repeated observation of integrated Sachs-Wolfe imprints $\sim5\times$ stronger than expected in the $Λ$CDM model from R>100 $Mpc/h$ super-structures. Here we show that the inhomogeneous AvERA model of emerging curvature is capable of telling a plausible albeit radically differe…
We use the WISE-2MASS infrared galaxy catalog matched with Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) galaxies to search for a supervoid in the direction of the Cosmic Microwave Background Cold Spot. Our imaging catalog has median redshift $z\simeq 0.14$, and we obtain photometric redshifts from PS1 optical colours to create a tomographic map of the galaxy distribution. The radial profile centred on the Cold Spot shows a large low density region, extending over 10's of degrees. Motivated by previous Cosmic Microwave Background results, we test for underdensities within two angular radii, $5^\circ$, and $15^\circ$. The…
We propose a "feature-scattering" mechanism to explain the cosmic microwave background cold spot seen from WMAP and Planck maps. If there are hidden features in the potential of multi-field inflation, the inflationary trajectory can be scattered by such features. The scattering is controlled by the amount of isocurvature fluctuations, and thus can be considered as a mechanism to convert isocurvature fluctuations into curvature fluctuations. This mechanism predicts localized cold spots (instead of hot ones) on the CMB. In addition, it may also bridge a connection between the cold spot and a dip…
We re-analyse the cosmic microwave background (CMB) Cold Spot (CS) anomaly with particular focus on understanding the bias a mask (contaminated by Galactic and point sources) may introduce. We measure the coldest spot, found by applying the Spherical Mexican Hat Wavelet transform on 100 000 cut-sky (masked) and full-sky CMB simulated maps. The CS itself is barely affected by the mask; we estimate a 94 per cent probability that the CS is the full-sky temperature minimum. However, approximately 48 per cent (masked fraction of the mask) of full-sky minima are obscured by the mask. Since the obser…
The Cold Spot, with an unusually cold region surrounded by a hot ring, is a statistically significant anomaly in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) sky. In this work we assess whether different sets of multiple subvoids based on the 2dF-VST ATLAS Cold Spot galaxy redshift survey or a collapsing cosmic texture could have produced such an anomaly through a simultaneous search for their gravitational redshift and lensing signatures on the {\it Planck} CMB temperature anisotropies. We use patches with radii $R=10^\circ$ and $R=20^\circ$ to account for the inner cold region as well as the outer …
The structure of the cold spot, of a non-Gaussian anomaly in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky first detected by Vielva et al. is studied using the data by Planck satellite. The obtained map of the degree of stochasticity (K-map) of CMB for the cold spot, reveals, most clearly in 100 GHz band, a shell-type structure with a center coinciding with the minima of the temperature distribution. The shell structure is non-Gaussian at a 4σconfidence level. Such behavior of the K-map supports the void nature of the cold spot. The applied method can be used for tracing voids that have no signatu…
我们计算的温度和偏振模式中产生的各向异性宇宙模型从比安基分类。我们发现，局部功能的温度模式，也许类似于在威尔金森微波各向异性探测器（WMAP）的数据中观察到的冷点，可以产生在模型中具有负空间曲率，即比安基类型V和VII $_{h}$。这两种模型也产生相干偏振模式。然而，在Bianchi VII $_h$中，当光沿着测地线传播时偏振角的旋转可以将E模式转换为B模式，但在Bianchi V中，情况不一定如此。因此，在原则上可以产生局部温度特征，而不违反现有观测对宇宙微波背景极化奇宇称分量的限制。
The alignment of the CMB Cold Spot and the Eridanus supervoid suggests a physical connection between these two relatively rare objects. We use galaxy cata\-logues with photometric (2MPZ) and spectroscopic (6dF) redshift measurements, supplemented by low-redshift compilations of cosmic voids, in order to improve the 3D mapping of the matter density in the Eridanus constellation. We find evidence for a supervoid with a significant elongation in the line-of-sight, effectively spanning the total redshift range $z<0.3$. Our tomographic imaging reveals important substructure in the Eridanus supervoi…
Understanding the observed Cold Spot (CS) (temperature of ~ -150 mu K at its centre) on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is an outstanding problem. Explanations vary from assuming it is just a > 3 sigma primordial Gaussian fluctuation to the imprint of a supervoid via the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe and Rees-Sciama (ISW+RS) effects. Since single spherical supervoids cannot account for the full profile, the ISW+RS of multiple line-of-sight voids is studied here to mimic the structure of the cosmic web. Two structure configurations are considered. The first, through simulations of 20 voids, prod…
The Cold Spot (CS) is a clear feature in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB); it could be of primordial origin, or caused by a intervening structure along the line of sight. We identified a large projected underdensity in the recently constructed WISE-2MASS all-sky infrared galaxy catalogue aligned with the Cold Spot direction at $(l,b)\approx(209^\circ,-57^\circ)$. It has an angular size of tens of degrees, and shows a $\sim20\%$ galaxy underdensity in the center. Moreover, we find another large underdensity in the projected WISE-2MASS galaxy map at $(l,b)\approx(101^\circ,46^\circ)$ (herea…
The lack of large-angle correlations in the observed microwave background temperature fluctuations persists in the final-year maps from WMAP and the first cosmological data release from Planck. We find a statistically robust and significant result: p-values for the missing correlations lying below 0.24 per cent (i.e. evidence at more than 3 sigma) for foreground cleaned maps, in complete agreement with previous analyses based upon earlier WMAP data. A conservative cut-sky analysis of the Planck HFI 100 GHz frequency band, the `cleanest CMB channel', returns a p-value as small as 0.03 per cent,…
The CMB Cold Spot under the lens II: Lensing signatures in polarization and cosmic texture footprints
Center for Cosmology and Computational Astrophysics, Institute for Advanced Study in Physics, Zhejiang University（浙江大学物理学院高等研究院宇宙学与计算天体物理中心）；Institute of Astronomy, School of Physics, Zhejiang University（浙江大学物理学院天文研究所）；Observatório do Valongo, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro（里约热内卢联邦大学瓦隆戈天文台）；Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas（巴西物理研究中心）；North Hennepin Community College（北亨内平社区学院）
The Cold Spot is a puzzling large-scale feature in the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature maps and its origin has been subject to active debate. As an important foreground structure at low redshift, the Eridanus supervoid was recently detected, but it was subsequently determined that, assuming the standard $Λ$CDM model, only about 10-20$\%$ of the observed temperature depression can be accounted for via its Integrated Sachs-Wolfe imprint. However, $R\gtrsim100~h^{-1}\mathrm{Mpc}$ supervoids elsewhere in the sky have shown ISW imprints $A_{\mathrm{ISW}}\approx5.2\pm1.6$ times stronger than…
Single-field inflation, arguably the simplest and most compelling paradigm for the origin of our Universe, is strongly supported by the recent results of the Planck satellite and the BICEP2 experiment. The results from Planck, however, also confirm the presence of a number of anomalies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), whose origin becomes problematic in single-field inflation. Among the most prominent and well-tested of these anomalies is the Cold Spot, which constitutes the only significant deviation from gaussianity in the CMB. Planck's non-detection of primordial non-gaussianity on…
Cold Dark Matter Isocurvature Perturbations: Constraints and Model Selection
我们利用CMB（WMAP和ACBAR）、大尺度结构（SDSS发光红星系）和超新星（SNLS）数据来限制CDM等曲率模对原始扰动谱的可能贡献。我们考虑三种不同的混合物绝热模式在一个平坦的$Λ$ CDM宇宙学没有张量模式：固定的相关性与一个单一的光谱指数;一般的相关性与一个单一的光谱指数;和一般的相关性与独立的光谱指数为每个模式。对于固定的相关性，我们验证了WMAP分析完全不相关和反相关的模式，而对于一般的相关性与一个单一的指标，我们发现一个小收紧的约束的分数贡献的isocurvature模式观察到的功率超过早期的工作。对于一般相关的模式和独立的光谱指数，我们的结果是完全不同的，以前的工作，需要加倍的先验空间的isocurvature光谱指数，以充分探索该地区的高可能性。标准的马尔可夫链蒙特卡罗技术被证明是不适合这个特定的应用程序，而不是我们的结果与嵌套采样。我们还使用贝叶斯证据，计算简单的嵌套采样算法，比较模型，发现纯绝热模型优于我们所有的isocurvature模型。这种倾向是这样的，贝叶斯因子的对数，$\mathrm{ln} B < -2$的所有模型和$\mathrm{ln} B < -5$的情况下，完全反相关的模式与一个单一的光谱指数（曲率的情况下）和一般相关的模式与一个单一的光谱指数。
A great deal of attention has been given to the so-called Cold Spot in maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature. We present a similar analysis, searching for extremal spots in the CMB lensing convergence and lensing potential maps from the Planck 2018 data release. We perform a multi-scale and multi-filter analysis using the first three members of the Mexican-hat wavelet family to search for extremal features of different shapes and sizes. Although an initial analysis appears to show the existence of some extremal spots at scales below about 5 degree, we conclude, after margin…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) has non-Gaussian features in the temperature fluctuations. An anomalous cold spot surrounded with a hot ring, called the Cold Spot is one of such features. If a large underdence region (supervoid) resides towards the Cold Spot, we would be able to detect a systematic shape distortion in the images of background source galaxies via weak lensing effect. In order to estimate the detectability of such signals, we used the data of $N$-body simulations to simulate full-sky ray-tracing of source galaxies. We searched for a most prominent underdense region using t…
