3-POINT CORRELATIONS IN THE COBE DMR 2-YEAR ANISOTROPY MAPS

We compute the three-point temperature correlation function of the COB E Differential Microwave Radiometer (DMR) 2 year sky maps to search fo r evidence of non-Gaussian temperature fluctuations. We detect three-p oint correlations in our sky with a substantially higher signal-to-noi se ratio than from the first-year data. However, the magnitude of the signal is consistent with the level of cosmic variance expected from G aussian fluctuations, even when the low-order multipole moments, up to l = 9, are filtered from the data. These results do not strongly cons train most existing models of structure formation, but the absence of intrinsic three-point correlations on large angular scales is an impor tant consistency test for such models.