ASYMMETRY AND NON-RANDOM ORIENTATION OF THE INFLIGHT EFFECTIVE BEAM PATTERN IN THE WMAP DATA

Tentative evidence for statistical anisotropy in the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data was alleged to be due to "insufficient handling of beam asymmetries." In this paper, we investigate this issue and develop a method to estimate the shape of the inflight effective beam, particularly the asymmetry and azimuthal orientation. We divide the whole map into square patches and exploit the information in the Fourier space. For patches containing bright extragalactic point sources, we can directly estimate their shapes, from which the inflight effective beam can be estimated. For those without, we estimate the pattern from iso-power contours in two-dimensional Fourier space. We show that the inflight effective beam convolving the signal is indeed non-symmetric for most of the sky, and it is not randomly oriented. Around the ecliptic poles, however, the asymmetry is smaller due to the averaging effect from different orientations of the beam from the scan strategy. The orientations of the effective beam with significant asymmetry are parallel to the lines of ecliptic longitude. In the foreground-cleaned Internal Linear Combination map, however, the systematics caused by beam effect is significantly lessened.