The CMB Derivatives of Planck's Beam Asymmetry

We investigate the anisotropy in cosmic microwave background Planck maps due to the coupling between its beam asymmetry and uneven scanning strategy. Introducing a pixel space estimator based on the temperature gradients, we find a highly significant (~20 \sigma) preference for these to point along ecliptic latitudes. We examine the scale dependence, morphology and foreground sensitivity of this anisotropy, as well as the capability of detailed Planck simulations to reproduce the effect, which is crucial for its removal, as we demonstrate in a search for the weak lensing signature of cosmic defects.Comment: 5 pages, 9 figures Published in MNRA

Studying the Peculiar Velocity Bulk Flow in a Sparse Survey of Type-Ia SNe

Studies of the peculiar velocity bulk flow based on different tools and datasets have been consistent so far in their estimation of the direction of the flow, which also happens to lie in close proximity to several features identified in the cosmic microwave background, providing motivation to use new compilations of type-Ia supernovae measurements to pinpoint it with better accuracy and up to higher redshift. Unfortunately, the peculiar velocity field estimated from the most recent Union2.1 compilation suffers from large individual errors, poor sky coverage and low redshift-volume density. We show that as a result, any naive attempt to calculate the best-fit bulk flow and its significance will be severely biased. Instead, we introduce an iterative method which calculates the amplitude and the scatter of the direction of the best-fit bulk flow as deviants are successively removed and take into account the sparsity of the data when estimating the significance of the result. Using 200 supernovae up to a redshift of z=0.2, we find that while the amplitude of the bulk flow is marginally consistent with the value expected in a LCDM universe given the large bias, the scatter of the direction is significantly low (at >= 99.5 C.L.) when compared to random simulations, supporting the quest for a cosmological origin.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures; typos fixed; clarifications made; important references adde

Cosmological Constraints with Clustering-Based Redshifts

We demonstrate that observations lacking reliable redshift information, such as photometric and radio continuum surveys, can produce robust measurements of cosmological parameters when empowered by clustering-based redshift estimation. This method infers the redshift distribution based on the spatial clustering of sources, using cross-correlation with a reference dataset with known redshifts. Applying this method to the existing SDSS photometric galaxies, and projecting to future radio continuum surveys, we show that sources can be efficiently divided into several redshift bins, increasing their ability to constrain cosmological parameters. We forecast constraints on the dark-energy equation-of-state and on local non-gaussianity parameters. We explore several pertinent issues, including the tradeoff between including more sources versus minimizing the overlap between bins, the shot-noise limitations on binning, and the predicted performance of the method at high redshifts. Remarkably, we find that, once this technique is implemented, constraints on dynamical dark energy from the SDSS imaging catalog can be competitive with, or better than, those from the spectroscopic BOSS survey and even future planned experiments. Further, constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity from future large-sky radio-continuum surveys can outperform those from the Planck CMB experiment, and rival those from future spectroscopic galaxy surveys. The application of this method thus holds tremendous promise for cosmology.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables; to be submitted to MNRA