Can residuals of the Solar system foreground explain low multipole anomalies of the CMB ?

TL;DR

This paper explores whether residual emissions from Kuiper Belt objects in the solar system can account for low multipole anomalies observed in the Cosmic Microwave Background, suggesting a possible foreground influence.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate Kuiper Belt object emissions into CMB analysis, showing potential to reduce certain low multipole anomalies.

Findings

KBO emissions can decrease quadrupole-octupole alignment.

Inclusion of KBO signals reduces parity asymmetry.

KBO dipole modulation amplitude aligns with previous studies.

Abstract

The low multipole anomalies of the Cosmic Microwave Background has received much attention during the last few years. It is still not ascertained whether these anomalies are indeed primordial or the result of systematics or foregrounds. An example of a foreground, which could generate some non-Gaussian and statistically anisotropic features at low multipole range, is the very symmetric Kuiper Belt in the outer solar system. In this paper, expanding upon the methods presented by Maris et al. (2011), we investigate the contributions from the Kuiper Belt objects (KBO) to the WMAP ILC 7 map, whereby we can minimize the contrast in power between even and odd multipoles in the CMB, discussed discussed by Kim & Naselsky (2010). We submit our KBO de-correlated CMB signal to several tests, to analyze its validity, and find that incorporation of the KBO emission can decrease the quadrupole-octupole alignment and parity asymmetry problems, provided that the KBO signals has a non-cosmological dipole modulation, associated with the statistical anisotropy of the ILC 7 map. Additionally, we show that the amplitude of the dipole modulation, within a 2 sigma interval, is in agreement with the corresponding amplitudes, discussed by Lew (2008).