Is the local Hubble flow consistent with concordance cosmology?

Abstract

Yes. In a perturbed Friedmann model, the difference of the Hubble constants measured in two rest-frames is independent of the source peculiar velocity and depends only on the relative velocity of the observers, to lowest order in velocity. Therefore this difference should be zero when averaging over sufficient sources, which are at large enough distances to suppress local nonlinear inhomogeneity. We use a linear perturbative analysis to predict the Doppler effects on redshifts and distances. Since the observed redshifts encode the effect of local bulk flow due to nonlinear structure, our linear analysis is able to capture aspects of the nonlinear behaviour. Using the largest available distance compilation from CosmicFlows-3, we find that the data is consistent with simulations based on the concordance model, for sources at 20-150 Mpc.