Hi Raoul

One of your links was to the old news about the SZ effect corrupting the WMAP CMB signal - but Ned Wright wrote a response in his "News of the Universe" page almost as it came out...

Old News of the Cosmos

...and explains why the SZ effect hasn't corrupted the CMB.

Epicycles have been much maligned, but from the point-of-view of the ancients they fit the evidence better than heliocentrism, which suffered from the fact that stars didn't exhibit parallax, and yet some astronomers claimed they could resolve the stars with their naked eyes. So Aristarchus' solution of the stars being ultra far away couldn't be the answer if the stars could be resolved.

Of course what they really saw was diffractive blurring of pin point sources, but they didn't know that for a long, long time afterwards. Perhaps there is some weird effect that mimics a Big Bang CMB, but so far no one has offered an alternative model that is such a near-perfect black-body.

For now the ugly standard Lambda-CDM cosmology is what we're stuck with...

Adam