The curious case of the CMB cold spot

 WMAP cold spot

Astrobods have found a cold spot in the the cosmic microwave background radiation. Now that’s a problem cos there shouldn’t be no cold spot up there. And this has set them a-frettin’ and a-worryin’ about how to explain it away.

Today Pavel Neselsky at the Niels Boh Institute at the University of Copenhagen and a few chums have a go at understanding some of the statistical properties of the spot. The team says it cannot be explained away as an artifact and point to various interesting statitistical properties.

That’s handy cos whatever exotic origin astrobods dream up to explain the cold spot must also have these statisitical properties.

But for the moment, nobody is any the wiser about what causes that part of the sky to look so cold.

If ya wanna take a look, it’s in the southern hemisphere (the galactic co-ordinates are b = −57◦ and l = 209◦) in the constellation of Eradinus towards the galaxy NGC 1232. And it’s huge: about 10◦ across. That’s several times bigger than the moon. Ya can’t miss it!

Ref: The Mystery of WMAP Cold Spot

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