Galaxy Counts on the CMB Cold Spot

Abstract

The Cold Spot on the Cosmic Microwave Background could arise due to a supervoid at low redshift through the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. We imaged the region with MegaCam on the Canada-France-Hawai'i Telescope and present galaxy counts in photometric redshift bins. We rule out the existence of a 100Mpc radius spherical supervoid with underdensity delta=-0.3 at 0.5<z<0.9 at high significance. The data are consistent with an underdensity at low redshift, but the fluctuations are within the range of cosmic variance and the low density areas are not contiguous on the sky. Thus, we find no strong evidence for a supervoid. We cannot resolve voids smaller than 50Mpc radius; however, these can only make a minor contribution to the CMB temperature decrement.

9 pages. Minor updates to match the article accepted to ApJ.

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• Removal of two large scale Cosmic Microwave Background anomalies after subtraction of the Integrated Sachs Wolfe effect
• Evidence of Quasi-linear Super-Structures in the Cosmic Microwave Background and Galaxy Distribution
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• Spatial and temporal tuning in void models for acceleration
• Local properties of WMAP Cold Spot
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• On the void explanation of the Cold Spot
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• The CMB cold spot under the lens: ruling out a supervoid interpretation
• Probing supervoids with weak lensing
• HD 42659: The only known roAp star in a spectroscopic binary observed with B photometry, TESS and SALT
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