A remarkable inconsistency between the calibrated differential time-ordered data (TOD) of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mission, which is the input for map-making, and the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps published by the WMAP team is revealed, indicating that there must exist a serious problem in the map making routine of the WMAP team. This inconsistency is easy to be confirmed without the use of WMAP map-making software. In view of the importance of this issue for cosmology study, the authors invite readers to check it by themselves.
In recent years, there have been a large number of studies which support violation of statistical isotropy. Meanwhile, there are some studies which also found inconsistency. We use the power tensor method defined earlier in the literature to study the new CMBR data. The orientation of these three orthogonal vectors, as well as the power associated with each vector, contains information about possible violation of statistical isotropy. This information is encoded in two entropy measures, the power-entropy and alignment- entropy. We apply this method to WMAP 9-year and PLANCK data. Here, we also…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps published by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) team are found to be inconsistent with the differential time-ordered data (TOD), from which the maps are reconstructed. The inconsistency indicates that there is a serious problem in the map making routine of the WMAP team, and it is necessary to reprocess the WMAP data. We develop a self-consistent software package of map-making and power spectrum estimation independently of the WMAP team. Our software passes a variety of tests. New CMB maps are then reconstructed, which are sig…
It is discovered in our previous work that different observational systematics, e.g., errors of antenna pointing directions, asynchronous between the attitude and science data, can generate pseudo-dipole signal in full-sky maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy published by The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) team. Now the antenna sidelobe response to the Doppler signal is found to be able to produce similar effect as well. In this work, independent to the sources, we uniformly model the pseudo-dipole signal and remove it from published WMAP7 CMB maps by model fit…
A Quadratic Maximum Likelihood (QML) estimator is applied to the WMAP 5 year low resolution maps to compute the CMB angular power spectra at large scales for both temperature and polarization. Estimates and error bars for the six angular power spectra are provided and compared, when possible, to those obtained by the WMAP team, without finding any inconsistency. The conditional likelihood slices are also computed for the $C_{\ell}$ of all the six power spectra from $\ell =2$ to 10 through a pixel based likelihood code. Both the codes treat the covariance for $(T,Q,U)$ in a single matrix withou…
A remarkable similarity between the large-scale non-Gaussian pattern of cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperatures obtained by Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mission and the distribution feature of observation numbers is noted. Motivated from such a similarity, in this work we check the WMAP data for the correlation between pixel temperature t and observation number N. Systematic effect of imbalance differential observation and significant t-N correlation in magnitude, distribution non-Gaussianity and north-south asymmetry are found. Our results indicate that, for precision co…
The reionization optical depth is the most poorly determined of the six $Λ$CDM parameters fit to CMB anisotropy data. Instrumental noise and systematics have prevented uncertainties from reaching their cosmic variance limit. At present, the datasets providing the most statistical constraining power are the WMAP, Planck LFI, and Planck HFI full-sky polarization maps. As the reprocessed HFI data with reduced systematics are not yet publicly unavailable, we examine determinations of $τ$ using 9-year WMAP and 2015 Planck LFI data, with an emphasis on characterizing potential systematic bias result…
A previous work (Monteserín 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 five-year WMAP data using a new estimator with lower bias and variance. Our results confirm this anomaly at higher significance, namely with a p-value of 0.31%. We perform the analysis using different exclusion masks, showing that a particular region of the sky near the Galactic plane shows a higher variance than 95.58% of the simulations whereas the rest of the …
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) are of great importance for cosmology. In previous work we had developed a pipeline for map-making independently of the WMAP team. The new maps produced from the WMAP raw data by our pipeline are notably different to the official ones, and the power spectrum as well as the best-fit cosmological parameters are significantly different too. What's more, by revealing the inconsistency between the WMAP raw data and their official map, we had pointed out that there must exist an unexpected pro…
We generate simulations of the CMB temperature field as observed by the WMAP satellite, taking into account the detailed shape of the asymmetric beams and scanning strategy of the experiment, and use these to re-estimate the WMAP beam transfer functions. This method avoids the need of artificially symmetrizing the beams, as done in the baseline WMAP approach, and instead measures the total convolution effect by direct simulation. We find only small differences with respect to the nominal transfer functions, typically less than 1% everywhere, and less than 0.5% at l<400. The net effect on the C…
Recently Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (B2) discovered the relic gravitational waves at $7.0σ$ confidence level. However, the other cosmic microwave background (CMB) data, for example Planck data released in 2013 (P13), prefer a much smaller amplitude of the primordial gravitational waves spectrum if a power-law spectrum of adiabatic scalar perturbations is assumed in the six-parameter $Λ$CDM cosmology. In this paper, we explore whether the $w$CDM model and the running spectral index can relax the tension between B2 and other CMB data. In particular, we find that a po…
We constrain the spectral index of polarized synchrotron emission, $β_s$, by correlating the recently released 2.3 GHz S-Band Polarization All Sky Survey (S-PASS) data with the 23 GHz 9-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) sky maps. We subdivide the S-PASS field, which covers the southern ecliptic hemisphere, into 95 $15^{\circ}\times15^{\circ}$ regions and estimate the spectral index of polarized synchrotron emission within each region using a simple but robust T-T plot technique. Three different versions of the S-PASS data are considered, corresponding to: no correction for Farad…
We constrain models of single field inflation with the pre-\textit{Planck} CMB data. The data used here is the 9-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (\textit{WMAP}) data, South Pole Telescope (SPT) data and Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) data. By adding in running of spectral index parameter, we find that the $χ^2$ is improved by a factor of $Δχ^2=8.44$, which strongly indicates the preference of this parameter from current data. In addition, we find that the running of spectral index $α_s$ does not change very much even if we switch to different pivot scales, which suggests that the …
In this paper we constrain the cosmological parameters, in particular the tilt of tensor power spectrum, by adopting Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (B2), Planck released in 2013 (P13) and Wilkinson Microwaves Anisotropy Probe 9-year Polarization (WP) data. We find that a blue tilted tensor power spectrum is preferred at more than $3σ$ confidence level if the data from B2 are assumed to be totally interpreted as the relic gravitational waves, but a scale invariant tensor power spectrum is consistent with the data once the polarized dust is taken into account. The recent…
Over the last nine years of cosmic microwave background observations, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe ($WMAP$) results were consistent with a $Λ$CDM cosmological model in which the age of the Universe is one Hubble time, and the time-averaged value of the deceleration parameter is consistent with zero. This curious observation has been put forward as a new coincidence problem for the $Λ$CDM concordance cosmology, which is in fact a `greater' coincidence than the near equality of the density parameters of matter and the cosmological constant. At the moment of writing these conference p…
The recently released Planck data have constrained 4-dimensional inflationary parameters even more accurately than ever. We consider an extension of the braneworld model with induced gravity and a non-minimally coupled scalar field on the brane. We constraint the inflation parameters in this setup, by adopting six types of potential, in confrontation with the joint Planck+WMAP9+BAO data. We show that a potential of the type $V(φ)=V_{0}\exp(-βφ)$ has the best fit with newly released observational data.
Relic gravitational waves (RGWs) leave well-understood imprints on the anisotropies in the temperature and polarization of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. In the TT and TE information channels, which have been well observed by WMAP and Planck missions, RGWs compete with density perturbations mainly at low multipoles. It is dangerous to include high-multipole CMB data in the search for gravitational waves, as the spectral indices may not be constants. In this paper, we repeat our previous work [W.Zhao & L.P.Grishchuk, Phys.Rev.D {\bf 82}, 123008 (2010)] by utilizing the Planck TT a…
(abridged) We study the impact of the large-angle CMB polarization datasets publicly released by the WMAP and Planck satellites on the estimation of cosmological parameters of the $Λ$CDM model. To complement large-angle polarization, we consider the high-resolution CMB datasets from either WMAP or Planck, as well as CMB lensing as traced by Planck. In the case of WMAP, we compute the large-angle polarization likelihood starting over from low-resolution frequency maps and their covariance matrices, and perform our own foreground mitigation technique, which includes as a possible alternative Pla…
Even though Planck data released in 2013 (P13) is not compatible with Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (B2) and some local cosmological observations, including Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) samples and $H_0$ prior from Hubble Space Telescope (HST) etc, Wilkinson Microwaves Anisotropy Probe 9-year data (W9) is consistent with all of them in the base six-parameter $Λ$CDM+tensor cosmology quite well. In this letter, we adopt the combinations of B2+W9 and B2+W9+SNLS+BAO+HST to constrain the cosmological parameters in the base six-parameter $Λ$CDM+tensor model with $n_t=-r/8…
Consistency between cosmological data sets is essential for ongoing and future cosmological analyses. We first investigate the questions of stability and applicability of some moment-based inconsistency measures to multiple data sets. We show that the recently introduced index of inconsistency (IOI) is numerically stable while it can be applied to multiple data sets. We use an illustrative construction of constraints as well as an example with real data sets (i.e. WMAP versus Planck) to show some limitations of the application of the Karhunen-Loeve decomposition to discordance measures. Second…
We present a new model of the microwave sky in polarization that can be used to simulate data from CMB polarization experiments. We exploit the most recent results from the Planck satellite to provide an accurate description of the diffuse polarized foreground synchrotron and thermal dust emission. Our model can include the two mentioned foregrounds, and also a constructed template of Anomalous Microwave Emission (AME). Several options for the frequency dependence of the foregrounds can be easily selected, to reflect our uncertainties and to test the impact of different assumptions. Small angu…
We present an updated data-analysis comparison of the most recent observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature anisotropies and polarization angular power spectra released by four different experiments: the Planck satellite on one side, and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACTPol) and the South Pole Telescope (SPT-3G), combined with the WMAP satellite 9-years observation data in order to be "Planck-independent" on the other side. We investigate in a systematic way 8 extended cosmological models that differ from the baseline $Λ$CDM case by the inclusion of many different combinat…
Combining the latest Planck, Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), and baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) data, we exploit the recent cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode power spectra data released by the BICEP2 collaboration to constrain the cosmological parameters of the $Λ$CDM model, esp. the primordial power spectra parameters of the scalar and the tensor modes, $n_s,α_s, r, n_t$. We obtained constraints on the parameters for a lensed $Λ$CDM model using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique, the marginalized $68\%$ bounds are $r = 0.1043\pm_{0.0914}^{0.0307}$, $n_s = 0.9…
We explore the cosmological consequences of the recently released Union2 sample of 557 Type Ia supernovae (SNIa). Combining this latest SNIa dataset with the Cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe 7 year (WMAP7) observations and the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) results from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 (DR7), we measure the dark energy density function $f(z)\equiv ρ_{de}(z)/ρ_{de}(0)$ as a free function of redshift. Two model-independent parametrization methods (the binned parametrization and the polynomial int…
In this paper we fit two models of Early Dark Energy (EDE) (an increase in the expansion rate before recombination) to the combination of Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) with data from either the WMAP or the Planck satellite, along with measurements of the baryon acoustic oscillations and uncalibrated supernovae luminosity distance. We study a phenomenological axion-like potential ('axEDE') and a scalar field experiencing a first-order phase-transition ('NEDE'). We find that for both models the 'Planck-free' analysis yields non-zero EDE a…
We present new arcminute-resolution maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature and polarization anisotropy from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, using data taken from 2013-2016 at 98 and 150 GHz. The maps cover more than 17,000 deg$^2$, the deepest 600 deg$^2$ with noise levels below 10 $μ$K-arcmin. We use the power spectrum derived from almost 6,000 deg$^2$ of these maps to constrain cosmology. The ACT data enable a measurement of the angular scale of features in both the divergence-like polarization and the temperature anisotropy, tracing both the velocity and density at last-scatte…
