Supports· moderateCCC-E009
An, Meissner, Nurowski & Penrose 2020: Hawking points at 99.98%, co-located in Planck and WMAP
- what the source states
- The paper reports "numerous previously unobserved anomalous circular spots, of significantly raised temperature" with angular radii between 0.03 and 0.04 radians and "a clear cut-off at that size," found "at a 99.98% confidence level" against 10,000 simulations; "the five strongest anomalous regions of the Planck map were found to occupy precisely the same locations as five of the strongest locations found in the WMAP data," and the authors argue that "Planck and WMAP have very different noise properties and it seems exceedingly unlikely that the observed presence of anomalous points in the same directions on both maps may come entirely from the noise."
- what we infer
- The program's strongest published claim, in a mainstream astronomy journal. Two components should be weighed separately: the headline significance (which Jow & Scott's marginalization removes, CCC-E010) and the cross-instrument co-location of the top spots (which survives as an unexplained observation — though co-location is expected if the spots are real features of the shared sky, artifact or not, since both instruments observe the same CMB).
- limitations
- The ring size defining the statistic was selected after inspecting the data — the specific defect the independent reanalysis corrects.
- All four authors are CCC proponents.
- Cross-map co-location distinguishes sky features from instrument noise, but not previous-aeon signals from ΛCDM fluctuations or data artifacts present in both maps.