Re-examination of Large Scale Structure & Cosmic Flows

Abstract

Comparison of galaxy flows with those predicted from the local galaxy distribution ended as an active field after two analyses came to vastly different conclusions 25 years ago, but that was due to faulty data. All the old results are therefore suspect. With new data collected in the last several years, the problem deserves another look. For this we analyze the gravity field inferred from the enormous data set derived from the 2MASS collection of galaxies (Huchra et al. 2005), and compare it to the velocity field derived from the well calibrated SFI++ Tully-Fisher catalog (Springob et al. 2007). Using the "Inverse Method" to minimize Malmquist biases, within 10,000 km/s the gravity field is seen to predict the velocity field (Davis et al. 2011) to remarkable consistency. This is a beautiful demonstration of linear perturbation theory and is fully consistent with standard values of the cosmological variables.