Microlensing By a Prolate All-Macho Halo

It is widely believed that dark matter halos are flattened, that is closer to oblate than prolate. The evidence cited is based largely on observations of galaxies which do not look anything like our own and on numerical simulations which use ad hoc initial conditions. Given what we believe to be a ``reasonable doubt'' concerning the shape of dark Galactic halo we calculate the optical depth and event rate for microlensing of stars in the LMC assuming a wide range of models that include both prolate and oblate halos. We find, in agreement with previous analysis, that the optical depth for a spherical (E0) halo and for an oblate (E6) halo are roughly the same, essentially because two competing effects cancel approximately. However the optical depth for an E6 prolate halo is reduced by ~35%. This means that an all-Macho prolate halo with reasonable parameters for the Galaxy is consistent with the published microlensing event rate.Comment: 7 pages (24K), LaTeX; 2 Postscript figure

The CMB Quadrupole in a Polarized Light

The low quadrupole of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), measured by COBE and confirmed by WMAP, has generated much discussion recently. We point out that the well-known correlation between temperature and polarization anisotropies of the CMB further constrains the low multipole anisotropy data. This correlation originates from the fact that the low-multipole polarization signal is sourced by the CMB quadrupole as seen by free electrons during the relatively recent cosmic history. Consequently, the large-angle temperature anisotropy data make restrictive predictions for the large-angle polarization anisotropy, which depend primarily on the optical depth for electron scattering after cosmological recombination, tau. We show that if current cosmological models for the generation of large angle anisotropy are correct and the COBE/WMAP data are not significantly contaminated by non-CMB signals, then the observed C_te amplitude on the largest scales is discrepant at the 99.8% level with the observed C_tt for the concordance LCDM model with tau=0.10. Using tau=0.17, the preferred WMAP model-independent value, the discrepancy is at the level of 98.5%.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, ApJ in pres