Has anyone taken a gander at the Observation Number Correlation in WMAP Data preprint? Does anyone have access to the final paper?

This one's pretty intriguing, if Eric Lerner's analysis or even my own meager interpretations are to be believed.

This is basically all about systematic bias in the WMAP observations and how to correct for them. There are some troubling observations in the WMAP so far (references removed for brevity):

The unexplained orientation of large-scale patterns of CMB maps in respect to the ecliptic frame is one of the biggest surprises in CMB studies.

A notable asymmetry of temperature fluctuation power in two opposing hemispheres is also found in the WMAP1 and COBE results . After the release of more WMAP results, similar large-scale anomalies are still detected in the WMAP3 data and WMAP5 data as well.

These apparent anomalies, if found to be cosmological origin, will pose a big challenge to the standard model of cosmology. Therefore, inspecting the effects of WMAP observation on released data at large angular scales more carefully is worth doing.

If you take a look at the graphs on page 4, you will see all the graphs have an x axis of N⁺ - N^-, where N⁺ seems to be the number of times (?) a sky pixel is observed by the 'plus horn', and N^- is the same for the minus horn. That's a pretty strong correlation there... with the Q band, the V band, the W band and the average temperature, albeit not completely straight-line.

I had a little harder time interpreting the temperature-exposure coupling (though it might be easier than I'm thinking it is)... I think it's saying that the more observations in general on a given pixel will give a higher temperature (is this reflected in the N⁺ - N^- versus temperature spread?) and/or that the map of number of observations closely resembles the map of the non-Gaussian features of the WMAP data. So, the non-Gaussian features might be an artifact of the way observations were carried out (COBE sounds like it used very similar plus/minus horn techniques).

If this all turns out to be the case, that really does raise the question: have we been getting confirmations of LCDM from such skewed data values, and if so, what happens to those with the corrections in place?

Might it save mainstream cosmology from the issues that non-Gaussian features might imply, perhaps only to run into something else?

Relating to figures 3 and 4, strange feature there is that in every band, the imbalance seems to strengthen considerably above delta-N = N⁺ - N^- = 50, i.e. when plus horn has had over 50 measurements more than minus horn, then the imbalance is amplified. That's just strange. The paper suggests that the observations with delta-N > 50 "may generally contain hottest sources", but I don't know if I'm happy with that explanation because the imbalance only jumps up on the positive side and the jump is sudden. If it would be due to hottest sources, being observed the most, beginning to contribute to the imbalance more and more, then I would expect a gradual increase, not the kind of sudden slope change that is shown in the figures 3 and 4. But I guess that the amount of gradual increase expected is difficult to estimate without knowing the specifics of the data.