The irregular distribution of galaxies and the anisotropies in the microwave background photons

An infrared search for the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect toward the intergalactic ''void'' discovered by Kirshner et al. has given a null result within 1 x 10/sup -4/ K at 1 standard deviation. The result implies that the change of the Comptonization parameter toward the hole is less than 2 x 10/sup -2/. From the hypothesis that the hot gas is absent in the hole, we get an upper limit 0.5 for the normalized density of the extragalactic gas.