Fast and spurious: a robust determination of our peculiar velocity with future galaxy surveys

Abstract

To date, the most precise measurement of the observer's peculiar velocity comes from the dipole in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This velocity also generates a dipole in the source number counts, whose amplitude is governed not only by the observer velocity, but also by specific properties of the sources, that are difficult to determine precisely. Quantitative studies of the source number counts currently give dipoles which are reasonably well aligned with the CMB dipole, but with a significantly larger amplitude than that of the CMB dipole. In this work, we explore an alternative way of measuring the observer velocity from the source number counts, using correlations between neighboring spherical harmonic coefficients, induced by the velocity. We show that these correlations contain both a term sensitive to the source properties and another one directly given by the observer velocity. We explore the potential of a Euclid-like survey to directly measure this second contribution, independently of the characteristics of the population of sources. We find that the method can reach a precision of 4%, corresponding to a detection significance of 24σ, on the observer velocity. This will settle with precision the present “dipole tension”.