A SEARCH FOR CONCENTRIC CIRCLES IN THE 7 YEAR WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE TEMPERATURE SKY MAPS

In this Letter, we search for concentric circles with low variance in cosmic microwave background sky maps. The detection of such circles would hint at new physics beyond the current cosmological concordance model, which states that the universe is isotropic and homogeneous, and filled with Gaussian fluctuations. We first describe a set of methods designed to detect such circles, based on matched filters and χ2 statistics, and then apply these methods to the best current publicly available data, the 7 year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) temperature sky maps. We compare the observations with an ensemble of 1000 Gaussian ΛCDM simulations. Based on these tests, we conclude that the WMAP sky maps are fully compatible with the Gaussian and isotropic hypothesis as measured by low-variance ring statistics.