TY - JOUR
T1 - A close examination of cosmic microwave background mirror-parity after Planck
AU - Ben-David, Assaf
AU - Kovetz, Ely D.
N1 - Funding Information:
ABD thanks Pavel Naselsky for useful discussions. We also thank the anonymous referee for helpful comments. We acknowledge the use of the Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis4 (LAMBDA) and the Planck Legacy Archive5 (PLA). ABD was supported by the Danish National Research Foundation. EDK was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number PHY-1316033.
Funding Information:
ABD was supported by the Danish National Research Foundation. EDK was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number PHY-1316033
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 The Authors.
PY - 2014/12/1
Y1 - 2014/12/1
N2 - Previous claims of significant evidence for mirror-parity in the large-scale cosmic microwave background (CMB) data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) experiment have been recently echoed in the first study of isotropy and statistics of CMBdata from Planck. We revisit these claims with a careful analysis of the latest data available. We construct statistical estimators in both harmonic and pixel space, test them on simulated data with and without mirror-parity symmetry, apply different Galactic masks, and study the dependence of the results on arbitrary choices of free parameters. We confirm that the data exhibit evidence for odd mirror-parity at a significance which reaches as high as ~99 per cent C.L., under some circumstances. However, given the bias exhibited by the pixel-based statistic on a masked sky, its sensitivity to the total power and the dependence of both pixel and harmonic space statistics on the particular form of Galactic masking and other a posteriori choices, we conclude that these results are not in significant tension with the predictions of the concordance cosmological model.
AB - Previous claims of significant evidence for mirror-parity in the large-scale cosmic microwave background (CMB) data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) experiment have been recently echoed in the first study of isotropy and statistics of CMBdata from Planck. We revisit these claims with a careful analysis of the latest data available. We construct statistical estimators in both harmonic and pixel space, test them on simulated data with and without mirror-parity symmetry, apply different Galactic masks, and study the dependence of the results on arbitrary choices of free parameters. We confirm that the data exhibit evidence for odd mirror-parity at a significance which reaches as high as ~99 per cent C.L., under some circumstances. However, given the bias exhibited by the pixel-based statistic on a masked sky, its sensitivity to the total power and the dependence of both pixel and harmonic space statistics on the particular form of Galactic masking and other a posteriori choices, we conclude that these results are not in significant tension with the predictions of the concordance cosmological model.
KW - Cosmic background radiation
KW - Methods: data analysis
KW - Methods: statistical
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84928751836&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/mnras/stu1903
DO - 10.1093/mnras/stu1903
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84928751836
SN - 0035-8711
VL - 445
SP - 2116
EP - 2124
JO - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
JF - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
IS - 2
ER -