Cosmological Implications of the CMB Large-scale Structure
  WMAP and Planck may have uncovered several anomalies in the full CMB sky that
could indicate possible new physics driving the growth of density fluctuations
in the early Universe. These include an unusually low power at the largest
scales and an apparent alignment of the quadrupole and octopole moments. In
LCDM, the quadrupole and octopole moments should be statistically independent.
These low probability features may simply be due to posterior selections from
many such possible effects. If this is not the case, however, their combined
statistical significance would be equal to the product of their individual
significances. Ignoring the biasing due to posterior selection, the missing
large-angle correlations would have a probability as low as ~0.1% and the low-l
multipole alignment would be unlikely at the ~4.9% level; under the least
favourable conditions, their simultaneous observation in the context of the
standard model could then be likely at only the ~0.005% level. In this paper,
we explore the possibility that these features are indeed anomalous, and show
that the corresponding probability of CMB multipole alignment in the R_h=ct
Universe would then be ~7-10%, depending on the number of large-scale
Sachs-Wolfe induced fluctuations. Since the low power at the largest spatial
scales is reproduced in this cosmology without the need to invoke cosmic
variance, the overall likelihood of observing both of these features in the CMB
is > 7%, much more likely than in LCDM. The key physical ingredient responsible
for this difference is the existence in the former of a maximum fluctuation
size at the time of recombination, which is absent in the latter because of
inflation.
