Cosmology with peculiar velocity surveys

  • Qin, Fei (Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute)
  • Published : 2021.10.13

Abstract

In the local Universe, the gravitational effects of mass density fluctuations exert perturbations on galaxies' redshifts on top of Hubble's Law, called 'peculiar velocities'. These peculiar velocities provide an excellent way to test the cosmological model in the nearby Universe. In this talk, we present new cosmological constraints using peculiar velocities measured with the 2MASS Tully-Fisher survey (2MTF), 6dFGS peculiar-velocity survey (6dFGSv), the Cosmicflows-3 and Cosmicflows-4TF compilation. Firstly, the dipole and the quadrupole of the peculiar velocity field, commonly named 'bulk flow' and 'shear' respectively, enable us to test whether our cosmological model accurately describes the motion of galaxies in the nearby Universe. We develop and use a new estimators that accurately preserves the error distribution of the measurements to measure these moments. In all cases, our results are consistent with the predictions of the Λ cold dark matter model. Additionally, measurements of the growth rate of structure, fσ8 in the low-redshift Universe allow us to test different gravitational models. We developed a new estimator of the "momentum" (density weighted peculiar velocity) power spectrum and use joint measurements of the galaxy density and momentum power spectra to place new constraints on the growth rate of structure from the combined 2MTF and 6dFGSv data. We recover a constraint of fσ8=0.404+0.082-0.081 at an effective redshift zeff=0.03. This measurement is also fully consistent with the expectations of General Relativity and the Λ Cold Dark Matter cosmological model.

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