The title of the thread should read Possible Cosmic Defect Discovered,....
but I don't know how to change the title. Sorry for the bait and switch.

http://www.physorg.com/news112541069.html

This provides a second proposed explanation for the WMAP cold spot. We also have the work of Rudnick et al.

Huge Hole Found in the Universe

Interesting! I'd like to hear what the follow-up tests are.

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Hmmm, I always hear "Ghost Hunters" and the like saying that anomalous cold spots are "evidence" of ghosts. I wonder, could there be "microtextures" hanging around a palnet's* surface?

*Or a planet's, for that matter?

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Me too. I'll try to find out.

I follow that misalignments in the symmetry-breaking pattern will likely form some kind of cosmic defects, BUT....

This resulting "intense energy" is not all that obvious....

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

So, can we take it back and get our money back? Didn't this Universe come with any kind of warranty

I have a copy of the article from Science.
1. The authors' analysis is consistent with a texture which unwound at about z=6, "after reionization...and potentially within reach of very deep galaxy or quasar surveys."
2. The authors claim that in their texture plus Gaussian CMB model, the spot would have been caused by a "time-dependent gravitational potential" and we would not see any "associated CMB polarization" whereas if the spot is a "rare statistical fluctuation in the primordial density", they would expect us to see a "radial pattern" of polarization around the spot.
3. They expect there to be "many smaller texture spots" which, again, could be distinguished from CMB density fluctuations by studying polarization.
4. They claim that a texture at z=6 would gravitationally lens objects behind it and also "lens the second-order CMB anisotopies."

http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/...sti_id=5929446

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1025143314.htm

"It is believed that textures collapse and unwind on progressively larger scales, creating intense energy as well as gravitational potential."

Interesting...."current data is suggestive but not yet compelling"...at least they are proposing further tests.Should make for some coffee talk over the winter meetings.
Are we now to assume that the vacuum with it's permanent "defects" is no longer Lorentz invariant, and that we can expect in our travails along the spiral arms of the Milky Way, to run into some defects, too?...that might be seen in a particle physics detector? Perhaps a predictable violation of conservation laws will occur?...or a new wrinkle in Special Relativity? That'd be nice for Christmas.
There is as yet, still, the old data showing roughly twice as many galaxies per square degree of sky in the Southern Hubble Deep Field as opposed to the Northern Deep Field, with as yet no commensurate doubling of missing dark matter to boot, though the two are said to be gravitationally in cahoots. One might surmise that we are two thirds of the way across some universal diameter, to accomodate the galaxy count difference,but that ought too, bring with it a doubling of dark matter,and a "bump" in the distribution of fainter galaxies unless Southern galaxy rotation profiles are distinctly different from Northern ones........be careful of things that go bump in the night.
catch a falling star,...pete

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A third rate theory forbids
A second rate theory explains after the fact
A first rate theory predicts...A. Lomonosov

This link mentions a physicist that claims the WMAP Cold Spot may be some sort of evidence of another universe "imprinting" itself on our universe.

I'm not clear about exactly what that means.

This paper provides data that indicates there are cold spots rather than cold spot.

“The mystery of the WMAP cold spot”

http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.1118

Perhaps we should check to see if there's been any service packs released that would provide a fix for it.

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The views expressed are the febrile product of an overactive imagination of a person who in shadows sees the gyrating Elvis-like ghost of Leonid Brezhnev.

"We apologize for the inconvenience"

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Could you land on a small enough texture?