Cosmic Microwave Background large-scale directional anomalies as seen by Planck and WMAP

It has been found that large-scale anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background are anomalous with respect to the predictions of the standard model of cosmology. We focused on the low multipole alignments, assuming the ΛCDM model and we confirmed that the quadrupole/octupole and the dipole/quadrupole/octupole alignments are anomalous with a significance up to 99.9%, for both WMAP and Planck data. Trying to explain the origin of this kind of anomalies we tested the dipolar model. This alternative phenomenological model explains the CMB hemispherical power asymmetry found in the WMAP and Planck data, so is possible that it can solve also other CMB directional anomalies. We show that the alignments are anomalous in the dipolar model too, roughly at the same level as in ΛCDM. We conclude that the dipolar model does not provide a better fit to the data than the ΛCDM.