A redshift survey towards the CMB Cold Spot
  We have carried out a redshift survey using the VIMOS spectrograph on the VLT
towards the Cosmic Microwave Background cold spot. A possible cause of the cold
spot is the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect imprinted by an extremely large void
(hundreds of Mpc in linear dimension) at intermediate or low redshifts. The
redshift distribution of over seven hundred z<1 emission-line galaxies drawn
from an I-band flux limited sample of galaxies in the direction of the cold
spot shows no evidence of a gap on scales of Delta-z> 0.05 as would be expected
if such a void existed at 0.35<z<1. There are troughs in the redshift
distribution on smaller scales (Delta-z ~0.01) indicating that smaller scale
voids may connect regions separated by several degrees towards the cold spot. A
comparison of this distribution with that generated from similarly-sized
subsamples drawn from widely-spaced pointings of the VVDS survey does not
indicate that the redshift distribution towards the cold spot is anomalous or
that these small gaps can be uniquely attributed to real voids.
