Cold imprint of supervoids in the Cosmic Microwave Background re-considered with Planck and BOSS DR10

TL;DR

This study re-examines the imprint of supervoids on the CMB using Planck and BOSS DR10 data, finding that the previously observed signals are not consistently replicated, highlighting potential systematic differences.

Contribution

It extends previous CMB stacking analyses to higher redshifts and compares spectroscopic voids with supervoids, revealing discrepancies and potential systematic effects.

Findings

Detected a significant temperature decrement for some supervoids.

No consistent correlation found in the larger DR10 void sample.

Amplitude of the temperature imprint matches previous observations for selected large voids.

Abstract

We analyze publicly available void catalogs of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey Data Release 10 at redshifts $0.4<z<0.7$. The first goal of this paper is to extend the Cosmic Microwave Background stacking analysis of previous spectroscopic void samples at $z<0.4$. In addition, the DR10 void catalog provides the first chance to spectroscopically probe the volume of the Granett et al. (2008) supervoid catalog that constitutes the only set of voids which has shown a significant detection of a cross-correlation signal between void locations and average CMB chill. We found that the positions of voids identified in the spectroscopic DR10 galaxy catalog typically do not coincide with the locations of the Granett et al. supervoids in the overlapping volume, in spite of the presence of large underdense regions of high void-density in DR10. This failure to locate the same structures with spectroscopic redshifts may arise due to systematic differences in the properties of voids detected in photometric and spectroscopic samples. In the stacking measurement, we first find a $\Delta T = - 11.5 \pm 3.7~\mu K$ imprint for 35 of the 50 Granett et al. supervoids available in the DR10 volume. For the DR10 void catalog, lacking a prior on the number of voids to be considered in the stacking analysis, we find that the correlation measurement is fully consistent with no correlation. However, the measurement peaks with amplitude $\Delta T = - 9.8 \pm 4.8~\mu K$ for the a posteriori-selected 44 largest voids of size $R>65~Mpc/h$ that does match in terms of amplitude and number of structures the Granett et al. observation, although at different void positions.