On Preferred Axes in WMAP Cosmic Microwave Background Data after Subtraction of the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe Effect

Understand

There is currently a debate over the existence of claimed statistical anomalies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), recently confirmed in Planck data.

• Recent work has focussed on methods for measuring statistical significance, on masks and on secondary anisotropies as potential causes of the anomalies.
• We investigate simultaneously the method for accounting for masked regions and the foreground integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) signal.
• We search for trends in different years of WMAP CMB data with different mask treatments.