hi boud, everyone
On Mon, 18 Apr 2003, boud wrote:
(So far there is no evidence for deviations from gaussianity).
There were several COBE analyses such as Pando, Valls-Gabaud & Fang:
http://de.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9810165
that showed non-Gaussianity. Since the WMAP map looks similar to COBE on large scales, i guess there should still be the same
non-Gaussianity.
Do you know of an article that claims Pando et al were wrong? I didn't read that paper, but I just rely, on the papers released along with WMAP data (eg. astro-ph/0302223 and many references therein among others the one of Pando 98) so maeybe I should write "so far
there
is no significant cosmological non-Gaussianity". And WMAP data are
found
to be consistent with assumption of Gaussian primordinal fluctuations.
Don't believe everything you watch/read on/in CNN/BBC/ApJ/MNRAS/A&A/...
In professional astronomy research articles, people often write sentences which sound good, but are vague, misleading and sometimes simply wrong. It's not because they want to be wrong, it's just that they don't have the time to do the analysis properly and they're under pressure to
publish
and to conform.
If you can find a WMAP analysis which shows that Pando et al 9810165 are wrong, that would be interesting.
there is a paper http://de.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9908070 where non-Gaussianity in the COBE data is explained by the so called 'eclipse effect'.