2018ApJ...861....8C

Measurement of the acoustic peaks of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies has been instrumental in deciding the geometry and content of the universe. Acoustic peak positions vary in different parts of the sky owing to statistical fluctuation. We present the statistics of the peak positions of small patches from ESA Planck data. We found that the peak positions have significantly high variance compared to the 100 CMB simulations with the best-fit ΛCDM model with lensing and Doppler boosting effects included. Examining individual patches, we found that the one containing the mysterious "Cold Spot," an area near the Eridanus constellation where the temperature is significantly lower than Gaussian theory predicts, displays large synchronous shifts of peak positions toward smaller multipole numbers with significance lower than 1.11 x 10^–4. The combination of large synchronous shifts in acoustic peaks and lower-than-usual temperature at the Cold Spot area results in a 4.73σ detection (significance p = 1.11 x 10^–6) against the ΛCDM model. And it was already reported in Finelli et al. that in the WISE-2MASS galaxy catalog at z < 0.3 the Cold Spot region is surrounded by surprisingly large underdense regions around 15° in radius, which are found to be in the same square patch. Thus, we propose that there is some extra localized unknown energy to stretch out the space in the transverse direction around the Cold Spot area to simultaneously account for the Cold Spot, the excessive shift of the acoustic peaks, and the large underdense regions.