Isotropy statistics of CMB hot and cold spots

Statistical Isotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation has been studied and debated extensively in recent years. Under this assumption, the hot spots and cold spots of the CMB are expected to be uniformly distributed over a 2-sphere. We use the orientation matrix, first proposed by Watson (1965) and Scheidegger (1965) and associated shape and strength parameters (Woodcock, 1977) to analyse whether the hot and cold spots of the observed CMB temperature anisotropy field are uniformly placed. We demonstrate the usefulness of our estimators by using simulated toy models containing nonuniform data. We apply our method on several foreground minimized CMB maps observed by WMAP and Planck over large angular scales. The shape and strength parameters constrain geometric features of possible deviations from uniformity (isotropy) and the power of the anomalous signal. We find that distributions of hot or cold spots in cleaned maps show no unusual signature of clustering or girdling. Instead, we notice a strikingly uniform distribution of hot spots over the full sky. The signal remains robust with respect to the four cleaned maps used and presence or absence of the non-Gaussian cold spot (NGCS). On the partial sky with WMAP KQ75 and Planck U73 masks we find anomalously low strength of non-uniformity for cold spots which is found to be robust with respect to various cleaning methods, masks applied, instruments, frequencies, and the presence or absence of the NGCS. Interestingly we find that the signal of anomalously weak non-uniformity could be due to contributions from the quadrupole and octupole and may be related with the low CMB temperature variance anomaly.

Automated summary

This study examines the statistical isotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation by analyzing the distribution of hot and cold spots. The results show a uniform distribution of hot spots and a weak non-uniformity for cold spots in cleaned maps.