Constraining Extragalactic Proper Motion with Gaia Astrometry

Abstract

The Solar System's secular motion with respect to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) rest frame is inferred from the CMB dipole and should induce a tiny, coherent apparent drift in the positions of nearby galaxies, referred to as the extragalactic proper motion. We test the feasibility of a purely geometric measurement of this effect by combining Gaia DR2 and DR3 astrometry with low-redshift spectroscopic galaxy catalogs to build a large, full-sky sample of $67,173$ galaxies. Although we do not obtain a statistically significant detection of the expected dipole signal, we place the tightest constraint to date on the extragalactic proper motion $\barπ$. Using galaxies with comoving distance $D>5 {\, \rm Mpc}$, we also place the tightest constraints on cosmic extragalactic proper motion $\barπ_{\rm cosmic}$, with uncertainty $\sim 10\times$ the measured CMB dipole value. Our $1σ$ uncertainty on the near field extragalactic proper motion $\barπ_{\rm nf}$ is approximately $\sim 1.3\times$ the expected CMB measurement, demonstrating that Gaia astrometry is approaching the sensitivity required for a direct detection of near field Hubble constant in future releases.