Motion toward the Great Attractor from an ether-drift experiment

Abstract

Since the end of 80's, the region of sky of galactic coordinates (l\sim 309^o, b\sim 18^o), corresponding to a declination \gamma\sim -44^o and right ascension \alpha\sim 202^o, usually denoted as the "Great Attractor", is known to control the overall galaxy flow in our local Universe. In this sense, this direction might represent a natural candidate to characterize a hypothetical Earth's "absolute motion". Our analysis of the extensive ether-drift observations recently reported by an experimental group in Berlin provides values of \alpha and \gamma that coincide almost exactly with those of the Great Attractor and not with the values \gamma\sim -6^o and \alpha\sim 168^o obtained from a dipole fit to the anisotropy of the CMB. This supports in a new fashion the existence of a discrepancy between the observed motion of the Local Group and the direction obtained from the CMB dipole.