51. Detection of a Supervoid Aligned with the Cold Spot of the Cosmic Microwave Background
- Author
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Szapudi, István, Kovács, András, Granett, Benjamin R., Frei, Zsolt, Silk, Joseph, Burgett, Will, Cole, Shaun, Draper, Peter W., Farrow, Daniel J., Kaiser, Nicholas, Magnier, Eugene A., Metcalfe, Nigel, Morgan, Jeffrey S., Price, Paul, Tonry, John, and Wainscoat, Richard
- Subjects
Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics - 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 $z\simeq 0.14$, 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, $5^\circ$, and $15^\circ$. The counts in photometric redshift bins show significantly low densities at high detection significance, $\gtrsim 5 \sigma$ and $\gtrsim 6 \sigma$, respectively, for the two fiducial radii. The line-of-sight position of the deepest region of the void is $z\simeq 0.15-0.25$. Our data, combined with an earlier measurement by Granett et al. 2010, are consistent with a large $R_{\rm void}=(220 \pm 50) h^{-1}Mpc $ supervoid with $\delta_{m} \simeq -0.14 \pm 0.04$ centered at $z=0.22\pm0.03$. Such a supervoid, constituting at least a $\simeq 3.3\sigma$ fluctuation in a Gaussian distribution of the $\Lambda CDM$ model, is a plausible cause for the Cold Spot., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication by MNRAS
- Published
- 2014
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