PROBING THE UNIVERSE'S TILT WITH THE COSMIC INFRARED BACKGROUND DIPOLE

Abstract

Conventional interpretation of the observed cosmic microwave background (CMB) dipole is that all of it is produced by local peculiar motions. Alternative explanations requiring part of the dipole to be primordial have received support from measurements of large-scale bulk flows. A test of the two hypotheses is whether other cosmic dipoles produced by collapsed structures later than the last scattering coincide with the CMB dipole. One background is the cosmic infrared background (CIB) whose absolute spectrum was measured to ∼30% by the COBE satellite. Over the 100–500 μm wavelength range its spectral energy distribution can provide a probe of its alignment with the CMB. This is tested with the COBE FIRAS data set which is available for such a measurement because of its low noise and frequency resolution which are important for Galaxy subtraction. Although the FIRAS instrument noise is in principle low enough to determine the CIB dipole, the Galactic foreground is sufficiently close spectrally to keep the CIB dipole hidden. A similar analysis is performed with DIRBE, which—because of the limited frequency coverage—provides a poorer data set. We discuss strategies for measuring the CIB dipole with future instruments to probe the tilt and apply it to the Planck, Herschel, and the proposed Pixie missions. We demonstrate that a future FIRAS-like instrument with instrument noise a factor of ∼10 lower than FIRAS would make a statistically significant measurement of the CIB dipole. We find that the Planck and Herschel data sets will not allow a robust CIB dipole measurement. The Pixie instrument promises a determination of the CIB dipole and its alignment with either the CMB dipole or the dipole galaxy acceleration vector.