Dark Energy Cosmology with the Alternative Cosmic Microwave Background Data

TL;DR

This paper investigates how systematic errors in CMB data processing, specifically a proposed timing asynchrony correction, could impact dark energy cosmological inferences, testing the robustness of current models.

Contribution

It assesses the implications of an alternative CMB map, corrected for a claimed data processing bug, on dark energy cosmology, highlighting the robustness of current cosmological conclusions.

Findings

Examines the effect of alternative CMB data on dark energy parameters

Tests the stability of dark energy models against potential systematic errors

Provides insights into the reliability of cosmological inferences from CMB data

Abstract

Recently, in a series of works by Liu and Li (L&L), they claimed that there exists a timing asynchrony of $-25.6\,$ms between the spacecraft attitude and radiometer output timestamps in the original raw WMAP time-ordered data (TOD). L&L reprocessed the WMAP data while the aforementioned timing asynchrony has been corrected, and they obtained an alternative CMB map in which the quadrupole dropped to nearly zero. In the present work, we try to see the implications to dark energy cosmology if L&L are right. While L&L claimed that there is a bug in the WMAP pipeline which leads to significantly different cosmological parameters, an interesting question naturally arises, namely, how robust is the current dark energy cosmology with respect to systematic errors and bugs? So, in this work, we adopt the alternative CMB data of L&L as a strawman to study the robustness of dark energy predictions.