Probing cosmic isotropy with Gamma-ray bursts: A dipole and quadrupole analysis of BATSE and Fermi GBM data

TL;DR

This study tests the large-scale isotropy of the universe using gamma-ray burst data from BATSE and Fermi GBM, employing spherical harmonic analysis to identify potential anisotropies and assess the impact of instrumental effects.

Contribution

It introduces a method for analyzing GRB sky maps with harmonic decomposition and evaluates the influence of exposure corrections on anisotropy signals.

Findings

Dipole amplitudes are consistent with isotropy within 1 sigma.

Quadrupole signals are initially elevated but vanish after exposure correction.

Instrumental non-uniformities explain observed quadrupole anisotropies.

Abstract

The cosmological principle, asserting large-scale homogeneity and isotropy, underpins the standard model of cosmology. Testing its validity using independent astronomical probes remains crucial for understanding the global structure of the Universe. We investigate the angular distribution of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) using two of the most comprehensive all-sky datasets available, the BATSE (CGRO) and Fermi GBM catalogs, to test the isotropy of the GRB sky at large angular scales. We perform spherical harmonic decomposition of the GRB sky maps and estimate the dipole and quadrupole amplitudes. Statistical significance is evaluated by comparing the observed multipole amplitudes against distributions derived from 500 Monte Carlo realizations of isotropic skies. Our results show that the observed dipole amplitudes for both BATSE and Fermi GBM datasets lie within the $1\sigma$ region of their respective null distributions. However, the quadrupole amplitude in the raw, uncorrected BATSE and Fermi GBM skies appears elevated at $3.7\sigma$ and $3.0\sigma$, respectively. After incorporating the BATSE sky exposure function, this apparent quadrupole anisotropy vanishes, indicating that instrumental non-uniformities fully account for the signal in that case. Owing to the absence of a publicly available full-sky exposure model for Fermi GBM, the Fermi analysis is restricted to the raw sky distribution. Our method's reliability is validated through controlled simulations, which show it can detect the injected dipoles in BATSE-sized isotropic skies. These findings reinforce the statistical isotropy of the GRB sky and underscore the importance of accurate exposure corrections in cosmological anisotropy analyses.