CosmoCoffee

I just posted this paper on astro-ph for Gerrit Verschuur,
whose findings were also read by me at the Imperial
College `Outstanding questions' conference.

Any comments on Verschuur's discoveries please?

Another small and ignorable `glitch' for the standard
cosmological model?

Note: while Rudnick et al were concerned with WMAP cold spots,
Verschuur's work is about many of the degree-scale hot spots.

I just gathered that this paper is seeing the light of day with its ApJ submission.

Two referee reports altogether. Both were favorably disposed with the work.
even though some more changes were called for.

Thus I urge you to READ carefully what Verschuur has to say! The claim here is
that a good fraction of the degree scale hot spots, hence the fluctuation power
in the first acoustic peak, is due to interaction between nearby Galactic HI clouds.

I have only skimmed through, but the main claim seems to be that there are correlations between galactic structure and the WMAP ILC map, on small scales. Therefore the ILC map (and power spectrum) may not be of cosmological origin.

This conclusion seems rather heavy and OTT - I'd rephrase it to there being evidence for galactic foreground contamination of the ILC map. However, perhaps this is not suprising considering that the WMAP team do not claim this map to be perfect, and in fact they say you should only use it for [tex]\ell \lesssim 10[/tex].

(Anyway, the significance of the correlation is another question...)

I performed an extensive study (with B. Z. Jiang, a PhD
student of Prof. S.N. Zhang at Tsinghua, Beijing) using wavelet analysis
of the WMAP and HI data, then cross comparing the number of close associations between the degree-scale wavelet hot spot centroids and HI clouds with that expected from simulated WMAP data where the hot spot
locations are by definition randomized.

The verdict is that we found no statistically significant associations
between the first acoustic peak hot spots and HI. We therefore
cannot support the claim of Verschuur.