No evidence for anomalously low variance circles on the sky

Abstract

In a recent paper, Gurzadyan & Penrose claim to have found directions on the sky centred on which are circles of anomalously low variance in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). These features are presented as evidence for a particular picture of the very early Universe. We attempted to repeat the analysis of these authors, and we can indeed confirm that such variations do exist in the temperature variance for annuli around points in the data. However, we find that this variation is entirely expected in a sky which contains the usual CMB anisotropies. In other words, properly simulated Gaussian CMB data contain just the sorts of variations claimed. Gurzadyan & Penrose have not found evidence for pre-Big Bang phenomena, but have simply re-discovered that the CMB contains structure.

4 pages, 4 figures, v3 accepted by JCAP

Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Big Bang, Blowup, and Modular Curves: Algebraic Geometry in Cosmology
• Pre-Big-Bang Cosmology and Circles in the Cosmic Microwave Background
• Application of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to CMB data: Is the universe really weakly random?
• Searching for concentric low variance circles in the cosmic microwave background
• Re-evaluating evidence for Hawking points in the CMB
• A dynamical system analysis of bouncing cosmology with spatial curvature
• A search for concentric rings with unusual variance in the 7-year WMAP temperature maps using a fast convolution approach
• Cosmic time and the initial state of the universe