Are There Echoes From The Pre-Big Bang Universe? A Search for Low Variance Circles in the CMB Sky

Abstract

The existence of concentric low variance circles in the CMB sky, generated by black-hole encounters in an aeon preceding our big bang, is a prediction of the Conformal Cyclic Cosmology. Detection of three families of such circles in WMAP data was recently reported by Gurzadyan & Penrose (2010). We reassess the statistical significance of those circles by comparing with Monte Carlo simulations of the CMB sky with realistic modeling of the anisotropic noise in WMAP data. We find that the circles are not anomalous and that all three groups are consistent at 3sigma level with a Gaussian CMB sky as predicted by inflationary cosmology model.

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Cited by in corpus (11)

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• Pre-Big-Bang Cosmology and Circles in the Cosmic Microwave Background
• Searching for concentric low variance circles in the cosmic microwave background
• Probing signatures of bounce inflation with current observations
• Re-evaluating evidence for Hawking points in the CMB
• 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
• Radial derivatives as a test of pre-Big-Bang events on the Planck data