Cosmic Strings and Their Induced Non-Gaussianities in the Cosmic Microwave Background

Figure 15

Normalized gradient magnitude of the string-induced temperature anisotropies shown in Figure 13(a). A logarithmic scale has been used to enhance the contrast by preventing the bright spots from saturating the color scale. The right panel is the gradient magnitude obtained after convolution by a Planck-like Gaussian beam of resolution . Notice that the color scale is back to linear, most of the bright spots being now smoothed by the beam.

(a)

(b)