Probing the Dark Flow Signal in WMAP 9 -Year and Planck Cosmic Microwave Background Maps

The “dark flow” dipole is a statistically significant dipole found at the position of galaxy clusters in filtered maps of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropies. The dipole measured in WMAP 3-, 5-, and 7- year data releases was (1) mutually consistent, (2) roughly aligned with the all-sky CMB dipole, and (3) correlated with clusters’ X-ray luminosities. We analyzed WMAP 9 -year and Planck 1st- year data releases using a catalog of 980 clusters outside of the Kp0 mask to test our earlier findings. The dipoles measured on these new data sets are fully compatible with our earlier estimates, are similar in amplitude and direction to our previous results, and are in disagreement with the results of an earlier study by the Planck Collaboration. Furthermore, in the Planck data sets dipoles are found to be independent of frequency, ruling out the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich as the source of the effect. In the data of both WMAP and Planck we find a clear correlation between the dipole measured at the cluster location in filtered maps and the average anisotropy on the original maps, further proving that the dipole is associated with clusters. The dipole signal is dominated by the most massive clusters, with a statistical significance that is better than 99%, slightly larger than in WMAP. Since both data sets differ in foreground contributions, instrumental noise, and other systematics, the agreement between the WMAP and Planck dipoles argues against them being due to systematic effects in either of the experiments.