A comparison of anisotropic statistical properties of CMB maps based on the WMAP and planck space mission data

Abstract

We compare the anisotropic properties of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps constructed based on the data of NASA’s WMAP (9th year of observations) and ESA’s Planck (2015 release) space missions. In our analysis, we use two two-dimensional estimators of the scatter of the signal on a sphere, which amount to algorithms of mapping the ratio of the scatter in the Northern and Southern hemispheres depending on the method of dividing (specifically, rotating and cutting) the sky into hemispheres. The scatter is computed either as a standard deviation σ, or as the difference between the minimum and maximum values on a given hemisphere. Applying both estimators to the CMB anisotropy datameasured by two spacemissions, Planck and WMAP, we compared the variations of the background at different angular scales.Maps with a resolution of l ≤ 100 show that the division into regions with different levels of statistical anisotropy lies close to the ecliptic plane, and after preliminary removal of the l ≤ 20 harmonics from the CMB data, the anisotropic signal related to the Galaxy begins to dominate.