2008/01/31 by Ben W. P. Lew, B. S. Lew, Boudewijn F. Roukema +1 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Mathematical Theories and Applications #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Scientific Research and Discoveries #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1051/0004-6361:20078777
published as A&A 482, 747-753 (2008) · 8 pages, 6 figures, typo corrected/replaced to match version published in A&A
openalex publication_date 2008/03/04 · arxiv created 2008/04/24 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
It has been suggested by Roukema and coworkers (hereafter R04) that the topology of the Universe as probed by the “matched circles” method using the first year release of the WMAP CMB data, might be that of the Poincaré dodecahedral space (PDS) model. An excess in the correlation of the “identified circles” was reported by R04, for circles of angular radius of ~11° for a relative phase twist -36°, hinting that this could be due to a Clifford translation, if the hypothesized model were true. R04 did not however specify the statistical significance of the correlation signal. We investigate the statistical significance of the signal using Monte Carlo CMB simulations in a simply connected Universe, and present an updated analysis using the three-year WMAP data. We find that our analyses of the first and three year WMAP data provide results that are consistent with the simply connected space at a confidence level as low as 68%.