The Axis of Evil revisited

By K. Land, João Magueijo. 2006

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In light of the three-year data release from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, we re-examine the evidence for the 'Axis of Evil' (AoE). We discover that previous statistics are not robust with respect to the data sets available and different treatments of the Galactic plane. We identify the cause of the instability and implement an alternative 'model selection' approach. A comparison to Gaussian isotropic simulations finds the features significant at the 94-98 per cent level, depending on the particular AoE model. The Bayesian evidence finds lower significance, ranging from 'substantial' at A(ln E) ) ∼ 1.4 to no evidence for the most general AoE model.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9185d68b0f9f7a0031396f2edf71fd2b13a012bd

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. H. Eriksen
2. A. Banday
3. K. G'orski
4. F. Hansen
5. P. Lilje
6. D. Mota
7. Tomi Koivisto
8. A. Shafieloo

Citations in the corpus

• Anisotropic dark energy: dynamics of the background and perturbations (2008, background): “Given the a posteriori nature of these considerations, the cosmic variance (and the inevitable arbitrariness in any statistics), the statistical significance of all these anomalies is indeed a debatable issue [5–8].”
• Large-Angle Anomalies in the CMB (2010, unknown): “, [87, 88]).”
• POWER ASYMMETRY IN COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND FLUCTUATIONS FROM FULL SKY TO SUB-DEGREE SCALES: IS THE UNIVERSE ISOTROPIC? (2008, methodology): “The approach is inspired by a similar idea in Land & Magueijo (2007).”
• POWER ASYMMETRY IN WMAP AND PLANCK TEMPERATURE SKY MAPS AS MEASURED BY A LOCAL VARIANCE ESTIMATOR (2014, background): “…violations of the statistical isotropy (see, e.g., Tegmark et al. 2003; de Oliveira-Costa et al. 2004; Vielva et al. 2004; Larson & Wandelt 2004; Land & Magueijo 2005a, 2005b, 2007; McEwen et al. 2005, 2006; Jaffe et al. 2006; Hinshaw et al. 2007; Spergel et al. 2007; Cruz et al. 2007; Bridges…”