Publications (21)
The axis of evil
Kate Land, Joao Magueijo
We examine previous claims for a preferred axis at in the cosmic radiation anisotropy, by generalizing the concept of multipole planarity to any shape pref…
Cross-correlation of 2MASS and WMAP3: Implications for the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect
Anais Rassat, Kate Land, Ofer Lahav +1
We perform a cross-correlation of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) using the third year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data with the 2 Micron All Sky Survey (2MAS…
Cosmological Constraints from Type Ia Supernovae Peculiar Velocity Measurements
Christopher Gordon, Kate Land, Anze Slosar
We detect the correlated peculiar velocities of nearby type Ia supernovae (SNe), while highlighting an error in some of the literature. We find sigma_8=0.79 +/- 0.22 from SNe, and…
Probability Density of the Multipole Vectors for a Gaussian Cosmic Microwave Background
Mark R. Dennis, Kate Land
We review Maxwell's multipole vectors, and elucidate some of their mathematical properties, with emphasis on the application of this tool to the cosmic microwave background (CMB).…
Galaxy Zoo: The large-scale spin statistics of spiral galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Kate Land, Anze Slosar, Chris Lintott +9
We re-examine the evidence for a violation of large-scale statistical isotropy in the distribution of projected spin vectors of spiral galaxies. We have a sample of s…
Correlation between galactic HI and the Cosmic Microwave Background
Kate Land, Anze Slosar
We revisit the issue of a correlation between the atomic hydrogen gas in our local Galaxy and the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), a detection of which has been claimed in some l…
Galaxy Zoo : 'Hanny's Voorwerp', a quasar light echo?
Chris Lintott, Kevin Schawinski, William Keel +17
We report the discovery of an unusual object near the spiral galaxy IC 2497, discovered by visual inspection of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) as part of the Galaxy Zoo projec…
Template fitting and the large-angle CMB anomalies
Kate Land, Joao Magueijo
We investigate two possible explanations for the large-angle anomalies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB): an intrinsically anisotropic model and an inhomogeneous model. We t…
Living in a Void: Testing the Copernican Principle with Distant Supernovae
Timothy Clifton, Pedro G. Ferreira, Kate Land
A fundamental presupposition of modern cosmology is the Copernican Principle; that we are not in a central, or otherwise special region of the Universe. Studies of Type Ia supernov…
Galaxy Zoo: the dependence of morphology and colour on environment
Steven P. Bamford, Robert C. Nichol, Ivan K. Baldry +13
We analyse the relationships between galaxy morphology, colour, environment and stellar mass using data for over 100,000 objects from Galaxy Zoo, the largest sample of visually cla…
The Axis of Evil revisited
Kate Land, Joao Magueijo
In light of the three-year data release from WMAP we re-examine the evidence for the ``Axis of Evil'' (AOE). We discover that previous statistics are not robust with respect to the…
Galaxy Zoo: Chiral correlation function of galaxy spins
Anze Slosar, Kate Land, Steven Bamford +9
Galaxy Zoo is the first study of nearby galaxies that contains reliable information about the spiral sense of rotation of galaxy arms for a sizeable number of galaxies. We measure…
The Multipole Vectors of WMAP, and their frames and invariants
Kate Land, Joao Magueijo
We investigate the Statistical Isotropy and Gaussianity of the CMB fluctuations, using a set of multipole vector functions capable of separating these two issues. In general a mult…
Is the Universe odd?
Kate Land, Joao Magueijo
We investigate the point-parity and mirror-parity handedness of the large angle anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In particular we consider whether the observed…
Determining the motion of the solar system relative to the cosmic microwave background using type Ia supernovae
Christopher Gordon, Kate Land, Anze Slosar
We estimate the solar system motion relative to the cosmic microwave background using type Ia supernovae (SNe) measurements. We take into account the correlations in the error bars…
Galaxy Zoo: A sample of blue early-type galaxies at low redshift
Kevin Schawinski, Chris Lintott, Daniel Thomas +13
We report the discovery of a population of nearby, blue early-type galaxies with high star formation rates (0.5 < SFR < 50 Msun/yr). They are identified by their visual morphology…
Galaxy Zoo : Morphologies derived from visual inspection of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Chris J. Lintott, Kevin Schawinski, Anze Slosar +9
In order to understand the formation and subsequent evolution of galaxies one must first distinguish between the two main morphological classes of massive systems: spirals and earl…
Galaxy Zoo: A correlation between coherence of galaxy spin chirality and star formation efficiency
Raul Jimenez, Anze Slosar, Licia Verde +11
We report on the finding of a correlation between galaxies' past star formation activity and the degree to which neighbouring galaxies rotation axes are aligned. This is obtained b…
Cubic anomalies in WMAP
Kate Land, Joao Magueijo
We perform a frequentist analysis of the bispectrum of WMAP first year data. We find clear signal domination up to l=200, with overall consistency with Gaussianity except for the f…
Multipole invariants and non-Gaussianity
Kate Land, Joao Magueijo
We propose a framework for separating the information contained in the CMB multipoles, , into its algebraically independent components. Thus we cleanly separate informa…
Galaxy Zoo 1 : Data Release of Morphological Classifications for nearly 900,000 galaxies
Chris Lintott, Kevin Schawinski, Steven Bamford +11
Morphology is a powerful indicator of a galaxy's dynamical and merger history. It is strongly correlated with many physical parameters, including mass, star formation history and t…