Gaussianization of peculiar velocities and bulk flow measurement

Abstract

The line-of-sight peculiar velocities are good indicators of the gravitational fluctuation of the density field. Techniques have been developed to extract cosmological information from the peculiar velocities in order to test cosmological models. These techniques include measuring cosmic flow, measuring two-point correlation and power spectrum of the peculiar velocity fields, and reconstructing the density field using peculiar velocities. However, some measurements from these techniques are biased due to the non-Gaussianity of the estimated peculiar velocities. Therefore, we rely on the 2MTF survey to explore a power transform that can Gaussianize the estimated peculiar velocities. We find a tight linear relation between the transformation parameters and the measurement errors of log-distance ratio. To show an example for the implementation of Gaussianized peculiar velocities in cosmology, we develop a bulk flow estimator and estimate bulk flow from the Gaussianized peculiar velocities. We use 2MTF mocks to test the algorithm, and we find the algorithm yields unbiased measurements. We also find this technique gives smaller measurement errors compared to other techniques. In Galactic coordinates, at the depth of 30 h −1 Mpc, we measure a bulk flow of 332 ± 27 km s−1 in the direction (l,b) = (293° ± 5°, 13° ± 4°). The measurement is consistent with the ΛCDM prediction.