Tuesday, August 26, 2014

A Supervoid cannot explain the Cold Spot

from Blank On The Map

In my last post, I mentioned the claim that the Cold Spot in the cosmic microwave background is caused by a very large void — a "supervoid" — lying between us and the last scattering surface, distorting our vision of the CMB, and I promised to say a bit more about it soon. Well, my colleagues (Mikko, Shaun and Syksy) and I have just written a paper about this idea which came out on the arXiv last week, and in this post I'll try to describe the main ideas in it.

First, a little bit of background.