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The cold spot on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) could arise due to a supervoid at low redshift through the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. We imaged the region with MegaCam on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and present galaxy counts in photometric redshift bins. We rule out the existence of a 100 Mpc radius spherical supervoid with underdensity d = -0.3 at 0.5 < z < 0.9 at high significance. The data are consistent with an underdensity at low redshift, but the fluctuations are within the range of cosmic variance and the low-density areas are not contiguous on the sky. Thus, we find no strong evidence for a supervoid. We cannot resolve voids smaller than a 50 Mpc radius; however, these can only make a minor contribution to the CMB temperature decrement.

We construct a map of the time derivative of the gravitational potential traced by Sloan Digital Sky Survey luminous red galaxies (LRGs). The potential decays on large scales due to cosmic acceleration, leaving an imprint on cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation through the integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect. With a template fit, we directly measure this signature on the CMB at a 2s confidence level. The measurement is consistent with the cross-correlation statistic, strengthening the claim that dark energy is indeed the cause of the correlation. This new approach potentially simplifies the cosmological interpretation. Our constructed linear ISW map shows no evidence for degree-scale cold and hot spots associated with supervoid and supercluster structures. This suggests that the linear ISW effect in a concordance LCDM cosmology is insufficient to explain the strong CMB imprints from these structures that we previously reported.

We investigate the relationship between the dark matter and baryons in the linear regime. This relation is quantified by the so-called "filtering scale." We show that a simple Gaussian Ansatz that uses the filtering scale provides a good approximation to the exact solution.

We find that, even in the presence of discreteness noise, a Gaussianizing transform (producing a more Gaussian one-point distribution) reduces nonlinearities in the power spectra of cosmological matter and galaxy density fields, in many cases drastically. Although Gaussianization does increase the effective shot noise, it also increases the power spectrum's fidelity to the linear power spectrum on scales where the shot noise is negligible. Gaussianizing also increases the Fisher information in the power spectrum in all cases and resolutions, although the gains are smaller in redshift space than in real space. We also find that the gain in cumulative Fisher information from Gaussianizing peaks at a particular grid resolution depends on the sampling level.

We show that redshift-space distortions of galaxy correlations have a strong effect on correlation functions with distinct, localized features, like the signature of the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO). Near the line of sight, the features become sharper as a result of redshift-space distortions. We demonstrate this effect by measuring the correlation function in Gaussian simulations and the Millennium simulation. We also analyze the SDSS DR7 main-galaxy sample, splitting the sample into slices 2.deg5 on the sky in various rotations. Measuring two-dimensional correlation functions in each slice, we do see a sharp bump along the line of sight. Using Mexican-hat wavelets, we localize it to (110 +- 10) h -1 Mpc. Averaging only along the line of sight, we estimate its significance at a particular wavelet scale and location at 2.2s. In a flat angular weighting in the (p, rp ) coordinate system, the noise level is suppressed, pushing the bump's significance to 4s. We estimate that there is about a 0.2% chance of getting such a signal anywhere in the vicinity of the BAO scale from a power spectrum lacking a BAO feature. However, these estimates of the significances make some use of idealized Gaussian simulations, and thus are likely a bit optimistic.