Must the Cold Spot Be Compensated? Integrated Temperature Flux of the Spot's Profile and the Ring Amplitude Its Surroundings Allow
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: A primordial cold spot is not just a depression; integrated over a wide enough disc, its temperature flux must nearly vanish, because the feature is built from multipoles of order two and above whose spherical integrals are zero. This paper computes the compensation bookkeeping for the Cold Spot's published core profile. A Gaussian core of depth -150 microK and width five degrees has disc means of -118.1 microK within five degrees, -64.9 microK within ten degrees, and -33.1 microK within fifteen degrees; spreading the compensating flux over a ten-to-forty-degree annulus requires a warm ring of only 5.21 microK, below the level at which the spot's surroundings have been characterised. The spot's observed near-compensation is therefore neither surprising nor finely tuned: any band-limited primordial feature compensates automatically, and the required ring is too shallow to have been noticed or to be used as evidence. Claims that the spot's surroundings confirm or refute a model must first clear this few-microK bar. The study is computed, not measured.
Author: Aldred, William Alexander
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225812494
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