Re-evaluating evidence for Hawking points in the CMB

Abstract

We investigate recent claims for a detection of “Hawking points” (positions on the sky with unusually large temperature gradients between rings) in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps at the 99.98 % confidence level. We find that, after marginalization over the size of the rings, an excess is detected in Planck satellite maps at only an 87 % confidence level (i.e., little more than 1 σ). Therefore, we conclude that there is no statistically significant evidence for the presence of Hawking points in the CMB.