Detection of a Supervoid Aligned with the Cold Spot of the Cosmic Microwave Background
Istv\'an Szapudi, Andr\'as Kov\'acs, Benjamin R. Granett, Zsolt Frei,, Joseph Silk, Will Burgett, Shaun Cole, Peter W. Draper, Daniel J. Farrow,, Nicholas Kaiser, Eugene A. Magnier, Nigel Metcalfe, Jeffrey S. Morgan, Paul, Price, John Tonry, Richard Wainscoat

TL;DR
This study identifies a large supervoid aligned with the Cosmic Microwave Background Cold Spot, suggesting it could explain the Cold Spot through gravitational effects in the context of the Lambda-CDM model.
Contribution
First detection of a supervoid aligned with the Cold Spot using combined infrared and optical galaxy data, supporting its role in the Cold Spot phenomenon.
Findings
Identified a supervoid of radius ~220 Mpc/h at z~0.22.
Detected significant underdensity with >5 sigma significance.
Supervoid's properties are consistent with causing the Cold Spot.
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 , 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, , and . The counts in photometric redshift bins show significantly low densities at high detection significance, and , respectively, for the two fiducial radii. The line-of-sight position of the deepest region of the void is . Our data, combined with an…
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