The cosmic microwave background Cold Spot anomaly: the impact of sky masking and the expected contribution from the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect

Krishna Naidoo, Aurélien Benoit-Lévy, Ofer Lahav

We re-analyse the cosmic microwave background (CMB) Cold Spot (CS) anomaly with particular focus on understanding the bias a mask (contaminated by Galactic and point sources) may i…