Current Status Of Velocity Field Surveys: A Consistency Check

Abstract

We present an analysis comparing the bulk--flow measurements for six recent peculiar velocity surveys, namely, ENEAR, SFI, RFGC, SBF and the Mark III singles and group catalogs. We study whether the direction of the bulk--flow estimates are consistent with each other and construct the full three dimensional bulk--flow vectors for each survey. We show that although the surveys differ in their geometry, galaxy morphologies, distance measures and measurement errors, their bulk flow vectors are expected to be highly correlated and in fact show impressive agreement in all cases. We found a combined weighted mean bulk motion of 330 km s$^{-1}$ $\pm 101$ km s$^{-1}$ toward $l= 234^{\degree}\pm 11^{\degree}$ and $b=12^{\degree}\pm 9^{\degree}$ in a sphere with an effective depth of $\sim4000$ km s$^{-1}$.