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Register a new userConstraints on large scale inhomogeneities from WMAP-5 and SDSS: confrontation with recent observations
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Paul Hunt
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Measurements of the SNe Ia Hubble diagram which suggest that the universe is accelerating due to the effect of dark energy may be biased because we are located in a 200-300 Mpc underdense void which is expanding 20-30% faster than the average rate. With the smaller global Hubble parameter, the WMAP-5 data on cosmic microwave background anisotropies can be fitted without requiring dark energy if there is some excess power in the spectrum of primordial perturbations on 100 Mpc scales. The SDSS data on galaxy clustering can also be fitted if there is a small component of hot dark matter in the form of 0.5 eV mass neutrinos. We show however that if the primordial fluctuations are gaussian, the expected variance of the Hubble parameter and the matter density are far too small to allow such a large local void. Nevertheless many such large voids have been identified in the SDSS LRG survey in a search for the late-ISW effect due to dark energy. The observed CMB temperature decrements imply that they are nearly empty, thus these real voids too are in gross conflict with the concordance LCDM model. The recently observed high peculiar velocity flow presents another challenge for the model. Therefore whether a large local void actually exists must be tested through observations and cannot be dismissed a priori.
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We present a Gaussianity analysis of the WMAP 5-year Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropy data maps. We use several third order estimators based on the spherical Mexican hat wavelet. We impose constraints on the local non-linear coupling parameter fnl using well motivated non-Gaussian simulations. We analyse the WMAP maps at resolution of 6.9 arcmin for the Q, V, and W frequency bands. We use the KQ75 mask recommended by the WMAP team which masks out 28% of the sky. The wavelet coefficients are evaluated at 10 different scales from 6.9 to 150 arcmin. With these coefficients we compute the third order estimators which are used to perform a chi-squared analysis. The chi-squared statistic is used to test the Gaussianity of the WMAP data as well as to constrain the fnl parameter. Our results indicate that the WMAP data are compatible with the Gaussian simulations, and the fnl parameter is constrained to -8 < fnl < +111 at 95% CL for the combined V+W map. This value has been corrected for the presence of undetected point sources, which add a positive contribution of Delta_fnl = 3+-5 in the V+W map. Our results are very similar to those obtained by Komatsu et al (2008) using the bispectrum.
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