How isotropic is the Universe?

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• Daniela Saadeh (UCL)
• Monday 23 January 2017, 13:00-14:00
• CMS, Pav. B, CTC Common Room (B1.19) [Potter Room].

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A fundamental assumption of the standard model of cosmology is that the large-scale Universe is isotropic. Because of its centrality, it is essential to test this assumption. Breaking isotropy leads to Bianchi cosmologies, a set of solutions to the Einstein field equations of which only the subset describing rotating universes was previously tested against data. In this talk, I present a general test of isotropy considering, for the first time, all the degrees of freedom of anisotropic expansion. We analyse cosmic microwave background data from Planck, carrying out the first joint analysis of temperature and polarization data for this purpose. We also show that improved constraints on anisotropy may be obtained by extending the likelihood to high ell. For the vector mode (associated with rotating universes), we obtain a limit on the anisotropic expansion that is an order of magnitude tighter than previous Planck results using the CMB temperature only. We recover upper limits for all the other modes, with the weakest one arising from the regular tensor modes. We disfavour anisotropic expansion of the Universe with odds of 121,000:1 against.

This talk is part of the Cosmology Lunch series.

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