Hot and cold spots in the microwave background radiation

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Abstract
Temperature fluctuations of the microwave background result from a stochastic process which gives rise to ‘outbursts’ appearing as hot and cold spots in the brightness distribution δT/T over the sky. The statistical and astrophysical properties of such spots are considered, in particular the number of spots generated by density perturbations with a Zeldovich spectrum. It is shown that such spots should be detectable by modern sky surveys with temperature sensitivities of 0.1 mK or less.