A new discovery can now explain the very large cosmic "Cold Spot" that's been a mystery for more than a decade.

A team of astronomers led by Istvan Szapudi of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa may have found an explanation for the existence of the Cold Spot.

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Discovered in 2004, this strange feature etched into the primordial echo of the Big Bang has been the focus of many hypotheses. When the Cold Spot was first revealed by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), astronomers quickly realized the feature, if real, would be the largest structure ever seen in the cosmos.

But with just one space telescope providing the measurements, there was always the concern something mundane like instrumental error could be to blame.

By combining observational data from Hawaii's Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) telescope located on Haleakala, Maui, and NASA's Wide Field Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite, researchers may have found "the largest individual structure ever identified by humanity" and this structure may be creating the anomalous Cold Spot.

Earlier studies have shown there's little evidence for a very distant structure in the direction of the Cold Spot. But, paradoxically, it's harder to identify large structures that are closer to us than further away.

By constructing a 3D map of galaxies, researchers discovered a vast region only three billion light-years away that has a lower density of galaxies than the rest of the known universe.

This supervoid is huge, measuring about 1.8 billion light years wide. This vast supervoid could, therefore, be the largest structure ever identified by humanity.

Getting through a supervoid can take millions of years even at the speed of light, so this measurable effect known as the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect might provide the first explanation of the most significant anomalies found to date in the CMB.

The research falls short of definitively linking the supervoid with the Cold Spot, but it seems unlikely this vast supervoid located in the same position in the sky as the CMB Cold Spot is just a coincidence.

Details of the researched appeared in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

TagsMysterious 'Cold Spot' May be the Biggest Structure in the Universe, cold spot, Universe, Big Bang Theory, space exploration, supervoid, cosmic cold spot, NASA