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

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 introduce. We measure the coldest spot, found by applying the Spherical Mexican Hat Wavelet transform on 100 000 cut-sky (masked) and full-sky CMB simulated maps. The CS itself is barely affected by the mask; we estimate a 94 per cent probability that the CS is the full-sky temperature minimum. However, ∼48 per cent (masked fraction of the mask) of full-sky minima are obscured by the mask. Since the observed minima are slightly hotter than the full-sky ensemble of minima, a cut-sky analysis would have found the CS to be significant at ∼2.2σ with a wavelet angular scale of R = 5°. None the less, comparisons to full-sky minima show the CS significance to be only ∼1.9σ and <2σ for all R. The CS on the last scattering surface may be hotter due to the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect in the line of sight. However, our simulations show that this is on average only ∼10 per cent (about 10 μK but consistent with zero) of the CS temperature profile. This is consistent with Lambda and cold dark matter reconstructions of this effect based on observed line-of-sight voids.