Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2009-12-15
JCAP 1004:010,2010
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
17 pages, 3 figures; v2: minor changes, matches published version
Scientific paper
10.1088/1475-7516/2010/04/010
Features in the primordial power spectrum have been suggested as an explanation for glitches in the angular power spectrum of temperature anisotropies measured by the WMAP satellite. However, these glitches might just as well be artifacts of noise or cosmic variance. Using the effective Delta chi^2 between the best-fit power-law spectrum and a deconvolved primordial spectrum as a measure of "featureness" of the data, we perform a full Monte-Carlo analysis to address the question of how significant the recovered features are. We find that in 26% of the simulated data sets the reconstructed spectrum yields a greater improvement in the likelihood than for the actually observed data. While features cannot be categorically ruled out by this analysis, and the possibility remains that simple theoretical models which predict some of the observed features might stand up to rigorous statistical testing, our results suggest that WMAP data are consistent with the assumption of a featureless power-law primordial spectrum.
Hamann Jan
Shafieloo Arman
Souradeep Tarun
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