  Several analyses of the microwave sky maps from the Wilkinson Microwave
Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) have drawn attention to alignments amongst the
low-order multipoles. Amongst the various possible explanations, an effect of
cosmic topology has been invoked by several authors. We focus on an alignment
of the first four multipoles (\ell = 2 to 5) found by Land and Magueijo (2005),
and investigate the distribution of their alignment statistic for a set of
simulated cosmic microwave background maps for cosmologies with slab-like
topology. We find that this topology does offer a modest increase in the
probability of the observed value, but that even for the smallest topology
considered the probability of the observed value remains below one percent.

Astrophysics