The WMAP cold spot

Understand

The WMAP cold spot was found by applying spherical wavelets to the first year WMAP data.

• An excess of kurtosis of the wavelet coefficient was observed at angular scales of around 5 degrees.
• This excess was shown to be inconsistent with Gaussian simulations with a p-value of around 1%.
• A cold spot centered at (b = -57, l = 209) was shown to be the main cause of this deviation.