Speaker
Description
The Cosmological Principle, a fundamental tenet of the 'standard model of cosmology’, predicates a statistically isotropic distribution of fluctuations in the measured Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and polarisation sky maps. Enigmatic anomalies claimed in the WMAP and Planck CMB sky maps, and other recent observations, could challenge the standard model. However, these claims need to be cast in an objective mathematical framework and established with statistical rigour. Bayesian inference of the underlying covariance structure of random fields on the sphere in the Bipolar Spherical Harmonic (BipoSH) representation, developed in our research program, provides such a framework. We review recent inferences from Planck data and discuss future prospects for proposed CMB observations.
