I’ve posted a few times on this blog about Cosmic Anomalies, by which I mean apparent departures from the predictions of the standard cosmological model. From time to time I also talk about this subject at seminars and conferences.
There’s an interesting new paper on this topic on the arXiv now by Shaikh et al., with the following abstract:
You can click on the image to make it larger. You can also find the PDF version of the full paper here.
I find this Bayesian analysis of two of the apparent anomalies (low amplitude in the power spectrum at large angular scales and hemispherical power asymmetry) may be different manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon, which would make them easier to account for without invoking new physics. Rather than being two independent statistical flukes these measurements might both be the result of one, which would be more likely to occur in the standard model. This analysis however suggests that this might not be the case after all, and these are two different things after all. This presupposes, however, that the model chosen to describe the asymmetries is appropriate. Anyway, this paper is well worth a read if you’re into Bayesian model testing (which you should be)…
This also gives me the excuse to post the following poll, which has been running for several years (even longer than Brexit):
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In the Dark 