Title: The weird side of the CMB: Cold Spot 
Speaker: Wen Zhao (USTC)
Time: Thursday, 3:00pm, December 11th
Location: Lecture Hall, 3rd floor
Abstract: Both WMAP and Planck data show a number of large-scale anomalies in the CMB temperature anisotropies, which may indicate some unsolved contamination, systematic, or new physics in the early Universe. In this talk, I will focus on the well-known CMB "Cold Spot" found by WMAP, and confirmed by Planck. By defining the local statistics: Mean Temperature, Variance, Skewness, Kurtosis, and the Minkowski Functionals, we study the local properties of the CMB "Cold Spot", and find it deviates from the Gaussianity at ~ 99 percent significant level. We also find that this Cold Spot is a large-scale non-Gaussian structure, rather than a combination of some small structures, and the non-Gaussianity is totally encoded in the CMB low multipoles. Furthermore, we find that the cosmic texture can excellently explain all the anomalies of these statistics.
 
Group meetings and additional talks
Blackhole accretion and High-energy astrophysics Seminar
Location: 1608; Contact: Qixiang Yang <qxyang@shao.ac.cn>
Title:  Discovery of a flat-spectrum radio nucleus in NGC3115
Speaker: Qixiang Yang
Time: Tuesday, 2:00 pm, Dec 9
Title: A refined sub-grid model for black hole accretion and AGN feedback in large cosmological simulations
Speaker: Zhaoming Gan
Time: Friday, 10:00 am, Dec 12