Large-Angle Correlations in the Cosmic Microwave Background
  It has been argued recently by Copi etal (2009) that the lack of large
angular correlations of the CMB temperature field provides strong evidence
against the standard, statistically isotropic, inflationary LambdaCDM
cosmology. We compare various estimators of the temperature correlation
function showing how they depend on assumptions of statistical isotropy and how
they perform on the WMAP 5 year ILC maps with and without a sky cut. We show
that the low multipole harmonics that determine the large-scale features of the
temperature correlation function can be reconstructed accurately, independent
of any assumptions concerning statistical isotropy, from the data that lie
outside the sky cuts. The temperature correlation functions computed from our
reconstructions are in good agreement with those computed from the whole sky. A
Bayesian analysis of the large-scale correlations is presented which shows that
the data cannot exclude the standard LambdaCDM model. We discuss the
differences between our conclusions and those of Copi et al.
