COLD DARK MATTER AND DEGREE-SCALE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND ANISOTROPY STATISTICS AFTER COBE

We conduct a Monte Carlo simulation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy in the UCSB South Pole 1991 degree-scale experiment. We examine cold dark matter cosmology with large-scale structure seed ed by the Harrison-Zel'dovich hierarchy of Gaussian-distributed primor dial inhomogeneities normalized to the COBE-DMR measurement of large-a ngle CMB anisotropy. We find it statistically implausible (in the sens e of low cumulative probability F < 5% of not measuring a cosmological deltaT/T signal) that the degree-scale cosmological CMB anisotropy pr edicted in such models could have escaped a detection at the level of sensitivity achieved in the South Pole 1991 experiment.