Hot pixel contamination in the CMB correlation function?
  Recently, it was suggested that the map-making procedure, which is applied to
the time-ordered CMB data by the WMAP team, might be flawed by hot pixels. This
could lead to a bias in the pixels having an angular distance of about 141
degrees from hot pixels due to the differential measuring process of the
satellite WMAP. Here, the bias is confirmed, and the temperature two-point
correlation function C(theta) is reevaluated by excluding the affected pixels.
It is shown that the most significant effect occurs in C(theta) at the largest
angles near theta = 180 degrees. Furthermore, the corrected correlation
function C(theta) is applied to the cubic topology of the Universe, and it is
found that such a multi-connected universe matches the temperature correlation
better than the LCDM concordance model, provided the cubic length scale is
close to L=4 measured in units of the Hubble length.
