The signature of an anisotropic distribution of gamma-ray bursts

Abstract

Anomalies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps have been widely acquainted nowadays from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite to the Planck satellite. One of the anomalies is a multipole alignment from $l=2$ to $l=5$. In our work, we investigate the angular distribution of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) to find whether there is the same anomaly of GRB as CMB. We perform spherical harmonics expansion on GRB samples to derive coefficients of a few first terms of the expansion terms and find that there is rough multipole alignment from $l=2$ to $l=4$ while the dipole and $l=5$ multipole is in a distant direction, and that the quadrupole is obviously planar and the other ones are normal.