I'd like to point out that Laura Mersini-Houghton, Tomo Takahashi and I
predicted the existence of a void at [tex]z\leq 1[/tex] of size roughly 200 Mpc, in a couple of papers (arXiv:
hep-th/0611223,
hep-th/0612142) which studied the astrophysical signatures of our proposal for a dynamical selection of inflationary initial conditions. This involved considerations of both the backreaction of massive modes of the inflaton, as well as non-local entanglement of our inflating patch and other patches.
The net effect of all this, from the point of large scale
structure, is to add a
negative, scale dependent, contribution to
the Newtonian potential [tex]\Phi[/tex], which in turn gives rise to a negative density contrast superimposed upon the positive density perturbations inside the Hubble radius, resulting in voids at scales roughly present Hubble scale [tex]z\leq 1[/tex] and size of ~140-200 Mpc today.
This appears to be what the authors
of astro-ph/07004.0908 observed. (I think there were also observations by WMAP and SDSS previously). These
observations seem to be in agreement with our theoretical prediction of the effects of nonlocal entanglements between inflationary patches. If true, then the cold spot discovery would be a very exciting test of such quantum gravitational effects and may provide the first indirect tests for mechanisms for the selection of initial conditions and open a new window of physics beyond the horizon.
Among other tests, our model can be tested independently by considering
correlations between cosmic shear and temperature anisotropies. It would be interesting to see whether our results are consistent with the work quoted by Inoue.