Cosmology with extragalactic proper motions: harmonic formalism, estimators, and forecasts

Abstract

We conduct a thorough study into the feasibility of measuring large-scale correlated proper motions of galaxies with astrometric surveys. We introduce a harmonic formalism for analysing proper motions and their correlation functions on the sphere based on spin-weighted spherical harmonics, and study the statistics of the transverse velocity field induced by large-scale structure. We use a likelihood formalism to derive optimal estimators for the secular parallax due to the Solar System's motion relative to distant objects, and compute the variance and bias due to peculiar velocities and relativistic aberration. We use a simulated catalogue of galaxy proper motions with radial distributions and noise properties similar to those expected from Gaia to forecast the detectability of the proper motion dipole, whose amplitude may be considered a proxy for the Hubble constant. We find cosmic variance to be the limiting source of noise for this measurement, forecasting a detectability of $1$-$2\sigma$ on a single component of the local velocity, increasing to $2$-$4\sigma$ (equivalent to a 25%-50% measurement of the Hubble constant) if the CMB dipole is included as prior information. We conduct a thorough study into the radial dependence of the signal-to-noise, finding that most of the information comes from galaxies closer than a few hundred Mpc. We forecast that the amplitude of peculiar transverse velocities can potentially be measured with 10$\sigma$ significance; such a measurement would offer a unique probe of cosmic flows and a valuable test of the cosmological model.

24 pages, 19 figures. Fixed a few typos, results unchanged

References in corpus (11)

• Gaia Data Release 2: The astrometric solution
• Testing cosmological structure formation using redshift-space distortions
• Gaia Data Release 2: The Celestial reference frame (Gaia-CRF2)
• VLBI measurement of the secular aberration drift
• Detecting stars, galaxies, and asteroids with Gaia
• Detecting the polarization induced by scattering of the microwave background quadrupole in galaxy clusters
• GaiaNIR: Combining optical and Near-Infra-Red (NIR) capabilities with Time-Delay-Integration (TDI) sensors for a future Gaia-like mission
• Accurate determination of halo velocity bias in simulations and its cosmological implications
• Detection of Galaxies with Gaia
• All Transverse Motion is Peculiar: Connecting the Proper Motions of Galaxies to the Matter Power Spectrum
• Toward a Measurement of the Transverse Peculiar Velocity of Galaxy Pairs

Cited by in corpus (8)

• An estimation of the Local growth rate from Cosmicflows-3 peculiar velocities
• Catalog-based pseudo-$C_{\ell }$s
• Secular Extragalactic Parallax: Measurement Methods and Predictions for Gaia
• Direct geometrical measurement of the Hubble constant from galaxy parallax: predictions for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
• The Science of Fundamental Catalogs
• Can we constrain structure growth from galaxy proper motions?
• Ultra Long-Term Cosmology and Astrophysics
• Constraining H0 Via Extragalactic Parallax