Significant foreground unrelated non-acoustic anisotropy on the one degree scale in WMAP 5-year observations

Details Significant foreground unrelated non-acoustic anisotropy on the one degree scale in WMAP 5-year observations Significant foreground unrelated non-acoustic anisotropy on the one degree scale in WMAP 5-year observations

2009-04-16

arxiv.org/abs/0904.2513v3

Astrophysical Journal 708 (2010) 375-380

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

Final version to appear in ApJ

Scientific paper

The spectral variation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as observed by WMAP was tested using foreground reduced WMAP5 data, by producing subtraction maps at the 1$^\circ$ angular resolution between the two cosmological bands of V and W, for masked sky areas that avoid the Galactic disk. The resulting $V-W$ map revealed a non-acoustic signal over and above the WMAP5 pixel noise, with two main properties. Firstly, it possesses quadrupole power at the $\approx$ 1 $\mu K$ level which may be attributed to foreground residuals. Second, it fluctuates also at all values of $\ell >$ 2, especially on the $1^\circ$ scale ($200 \lesssim \ell \lesssim 300$). The behavior is {\it random and symmetrical} about zero temperature with a r.m.s. amplitude of $\approx$ 7 $\mu K$, or 10 % of the maximum CMB anisotropy, which would require a `cosmic conspiracy' among the foreground components if it is a consequence of their existences. Both anomalies must be properly diagnosed and corrected if `precision cosmology' is the claim. The second anomaly is, however, more interesting because it opens the question on whether the CMB anisotropy genuinely represents primordial density seeds.

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