The peculiar velocity field offers a unique way to probe dark matter density field on large scales at low redshifts. In this work, we have compiled a new sample of 465 peculiar velocities from low redshift (z < 0.067) Type Ia supernovae. We compare the reconstructed velocity field derived from the 2M++ galaxy redshift compilation to the supernovae, the SFI++ and the 2MTF Tully-Fisher distance catalogues. We used a forward method to jointly infer the distances and the velocities of distance indicators by comparing the observations to the reconstruction. Comparison of the reconstructed peculiar velocity fields to observations allows us to infer the cosmological parameter combination fσ8, and the bulk flow velocity arising from outside the survey volume. The residual bulk flow arising from outside the 2M++ volume is inferred to be $171^{+11}_{-11}$ km s−1 in the direction l = 301○ ± 4○ and b = 0○ ± 3○. We obtain fσ8 = 0.400 ± 0.017, equivalent to S8 ≈ σ8(Ωm/0.3)0.55 = 0.776 ± 0.033, which corresponds to an approximately $4\%\,$ statistical uncertainty on the value of fσ8. Our inferred value is consistent with other low redshift results in the literature.

In general relativity producing a regular bounce entails violation of Null Energy Condition for a dynamical source in the model. That generically indicates existence of ghosts or other instabilities. However, in cuscuton modification of gravity, the correspondence between a background bounce and violation of Null Energy Condition for dynamical sources is broken. Cuscuton action, modifies equations of motion in Infra Red limit allowing the background to go through a regular bounce phase. At the same time, since it does not contain any dynamical degrees of freedom, it does not lead to ghosts or other instabilities. Here, we present a toy scenario of a regular bouncing cosmology and prove this claim. Our model is presented as a proof of concept at this point and does not aim to explain observations in late time cosmology.

Abstract. This paper presents the first derivation of the quadratic action for curvature perturbations, ζ, within the framework of cuscuton gravity. We study the scalar cosmological perturbations sourced by a canonical single scalar field in the presence of cuscuton field. We identify ζ as comoving curvature with respect to the source field and we show that it retains its conservation characteristic on super horizon scales. The result provides an explicit proof that cuscuton modification of gravity around Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) metric is ghost free. We also investigate the potential development of other instabilities in cuscuton models. We find that in a large class of these models, there is no generic instability problem. However, depending on the details of slow-roll parameters, specific models may display gradient instabilities.

We present the Democratic Samples of Supernovae (DSS), a compilation of 775 low-redshift Type Ia and II supernovae (SNe Ia & II), of which 137 SN Ia distances are derived via the newly developed snapshot distance method. Using the objects in the DSS as tracers of the peculiar-velocity field, we compare against the corresponding reconstruction from the 2M++ galaxy redshift survey. Our analysis — which takes special care to properly weight each DSS subcatalogue and cross-calibrate the relative distance scales between them — results in a measurement of the cosmological parameter combination $f\sigma _8 = 0.390_{-0.022}^{+0.022}$ as well as an external bulk flow velocity of $195_{-23}^{+22}$ km s−1 in the direction $(\ell , b) = (292_{-7}^{+7}, -6_{-4}^{+5})$ deg, which originates from beyond the 2M++ reconstruction. Similarly, we find a bulk flow of $245_{-31}^{+32}$ km s−1 toward $(\ell , b) = (294_{-7}^{+7}, 3_{-5}^{+6})$ deg on a scale of ∼30 h−1 Mpc if we ignore the reconstructed peculiar-velocity field altogether. Our constraint on fσ8 — the tightest derived from SNe to date (considering only statistical error bars), and the only one to utilise SNe II — is broadly consistent with other results from the literature. We intend for our data accumulation and treatment techniques to become the prototype for future studies that will exploit the unprecedented data volume from upcoming wide-field surveys.

When measuring the value of the Hubble parameter, H0, it is necessary to know the recession velocity free of the effects of peculiar velocities. In this work, we study different models of peculiar velocity in the local Universe. In particular, we compare models based on density reconstruction from galaxy redshift surveys and kernel smoothing of peculiar velocity data. The velocity field from the density reconstruction is obtained using the 2M++ galaxy redshift compilation, which is compared to two adaptive kernel-smoothed velocity fields: the first obtained from the 6dF Fundamental Plane sample and the other using a Tully-Fisher catalogue obtained by combining SFI++ and 2MTF. We highlight that smoothed velocity fields should be rescaled to obtain unbiased velocity estimates. Comparing the predictions of these models to the observations from a few test sets of peculiar velocity data, obtained from the Second Amendment Supernovae catalogue and the Tully-Fisher catalogues, we find that 2M++ reconstruction provides a better model of the peculiar velocity in the local Universe than the kernel-smoothed peculiar velocity models. We study the impact of peculiar velocities on the measurement of H0 from gravitational waves and megamasers. In doing so, we introduce a probabilistic framework to marginalize over the peculiar velocity corrections along the line-of-sight. For the megamasers, we find H0 = 70.1 ± 2.9 km s−1 Mpc−1using the 2M++ velocity field. We also study the peculiar velocity of the the galaxy NGC 1052-DF2, concluding that a short ∼ 13 Mpc distance is not a likely explanation of the anomalously low dark matter fraction of that galaxy.