Large Scale Anomalies in the Microwave Background: Causation and Correlation

Understand

Most treatments of large scale anomalies in the microwave sky are a posteriori, with unquantified look-elsewhere effects.

• We contrast these with physical models of specific inhomogeneities in the early universe which then generate apparent anomalies.
• Physical models predict correlations between candidate anomalies, as well as the corresponding signals in polarization and large scale structure, reducing the impact of cosmic variance.
• We compute the apparent spatial curvature associated with large-scale inhomogeneities and show that it is typically small, allowing for a self-consistent analysis.