| Abstract: | In recent years analysis of the CMB sky has revealed several large scale anomalies in the data. A new anomaly we found recently is the existence of a unique direction in the sky around which giant rings have an anomalous mean temperature profile, at the 3σ level. This direction is in very close alignment with the direction of the afore measured anomalously large bulk flow of galaxies around us. We claim that a model involving a cosmic defect seeded by a pre-inflationary particle could explain the giant rings, the large bulk flow, and their alignment.
The talk is based on work done with A. Ben-David and Nissan Itzhaki published as "Giant Rings in the CMB Sky", ApJ 724 (2010) 374-378 and touches on previous works. |
