The cosmic microwave background Cold Spot anomaly: the impact of sky masking and the expected contribution from the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect

We re-analyse the cosmic microwave background (CMB) Cold Spot (CS) anomaly with particular focus on understanding the bias a mask (contaminated by Galactic and point sources) may introduce. We measure the coldest spot, found by applying the Spherical Mexican Hat Wavelet transform on 100 000 cut-sky (masked) and full-sky CMB simulated maps. The CS itself is barely affected by the mask; we estimate a 94 per cent probability that the CS is the full-sky temperature minimum. However, similar to 48 per cent (masked fraction of the mask) of full-sky minima are obscured by the mask. Since the observed minima are slightly hotter than the full-sky ensemble of minima, a cut-sky analysis would have found the CS to be significant at similar to 2.2 sigma with a wavelet angular scale of R = 5 degrees. None the less, comparisons to full-sky minima show the CS significance to be only similar to 1.9 sigma and <2 sigma for all R. The CS on the last scattering surface may be hotter due to the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect in the line of sight. However, our simulations show that this is on average only similar to 10 per cent (about 10 mu K but consistent with zero) of the CS temperature profile. This is consistent with Lambda and cold dark matter reconstructions of this effect based on observed line-of-sight voids.