paper

Testing anisotropic Hubble expansion

arXiv:2412.14607 · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2025/03/066

Abstract

The cosmological principle asserting the large-scale uniformity of the Universe is a testable assumption of the standard cosmological model. We explore the constraints on anisotropic expansion provided by measuring directional variation in the Hubble constant, , derived from differential zeropoint measurements of the Tully-Fisher distance estimator. We fit various models for directional variation in using the Tully-Fisher dataset from the all-sky Cosmicflows-4 catalog. The best-fit dipole variation has an amplitude of 0.063 0.016 mag in the direction () = (142 30, 52 10). If this were due to anisotropic expansion it would imply a 3% variation in , corresponding to = 2.10 0.53 km/s/Mpc if = 70 km/s/Mpc, with a significance of 3.9. A model that includes this dipole is only weakly favored relative to a model with a constant and a bulk motion of the volume sampled by Cosmicflows-4 that is consistent with the standard CDM cosmology. However, we show that with the expected Tully-Fisher data from the WALLABY and DESI surveys it should be possible to detect a 1% dipole anisotropy at 5.8 confidence and to distinguish it from the typical bulk flow predicted by CDM over the volume of these surveys.

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