THE COBE NORMALIZATION OF CMB ANISOTROPIES

With the advent of the COBE detection of fluctuations in the cosmic mi crowave background radiation, the study of inhomogeneous cosmology has entered a new phase. It is now possible to accurately normalize fluct uations on the largest observable scales in the linear regime. In this paper we present a model-independent method of normalizing theories t o the full COBE data. This technique allows an extremely wide range of theories to be accurately normalized to COBE in a very simple and fas t way. We give the best-fitting normalization and relative peak likeli hoods for a range of spectral shapes and discuss the normalization for several popular theories. In addition, we present both Bayesian and f requentist measures of the goodness of fit of a representative range o f theories to the COBE data.