Issue A&A Volume 482, Number 3, May II 2008 Page(s) 747 - 753 Section Cosmology (including clusters of galaxies) DOI 10.1051/0004-6361:20078777 Published online 04 March 2008

A&A 482, 747-753 (2008)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20078777

A test of the Poincaré dodecahedral space topology hypothesis with the WMAP CMB data

B. Lew^{1, 2} and B. Roukema<sup>1

1</sup>  Torun Centre for Astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus University, ul. Gagarina 11, 87-100 Torun, Poland
²  Department of Physics and Astrophysics, Nagoya University, Nagoya 464-8602, Japan
    e-mail: blew@a.phys.nagoya-u.ac.jp

(Received 2 October 2007 / Accepted 7 January 2008)

Abstract
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%.

Key words: cosmology: observations -- cosmology: cosmic microwave background -- cosmology: cosmological parameters

© ESO 2008

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