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Oxford University Press (OUP), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1(450), p. 288-294

DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stv488

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Detection of a Supervoid Aligned with the Cold Spot of the Cosmic Microwave Background

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Postprint: archiving allowed
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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

We use the WISE-2MASS infrared galaxy catalog matched with Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) galaxies to search for a supervoid in the direction of the Cosmic Microwave Background Cold Spot. Our imaging catalog has median redshift $z≃ 0.14$, and we obtain photometric redshifts from PS1 optical colours to create a tomographic map of the galaxy distribution. The radial profile centred on the Cold Spot shows a large low density region, extending over 10's of degrees. Motivated by previous Cosmic Microwave Background results, we test for underdensities within two angular radii, $5^∘$, and $15^∘$. The counts in photometric redshift bins show significantly low densities at high detection significance, $\gtrsim 5 σ$ and $\gtrsim 6 σ$, respectively, for the two fiducial radii. The line-of-sight position of the deepest region of the void is $z≃ 0.15-0.25$. Our data, combined with an earlier measurement by Granett et al. 2010, are consistent with a large $R_{\rm void}=(220 ± 50) h^{-1}Mpc $ supervoid with $δ_{m} ≃ -0.14 ± 0.04$ centered at $z=0.22±0.03$. Such a supervoid, constituting at least a $≃ 3.3σ$ fluctuation in a Gaussian distribution of the $Λ CDM$ model, is a plausible cause for the Cold Spot. ; Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication by MNRAS