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 γ\sim -44^o and right ascension α\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 αand γthat coincide almost exactly with those of the Great Attractor and not with the values γ\sim -6^o and α\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.