Spiral Galaxies and the Peculiar Velocity Field

We report results of a redshift-independent distance measurement survey that extends to all sky and out to a redshift of approximately 7500 km s −1 . Tully–Fisher (TF) distances for a homogeneous sample of 1600 late spiral galaxies are used to analyze the peculiar velocity field. We find large peculiar velocities in the neighborhood of superclusters, such as Perseus–Pisces (PP) and Hydra–Centaurus, but the main clusters embedded in those regions appear to be virtually at rest in the CMB reference frame. We find no compelling evidence for large-scale bulk flows, whereby the Local Group, Hydra–Cen and PP would share a motion of several hundred km s −1 with respect to the CMB. Denser sampling in the PP region allows a clear detection of infall and backflow motions, which can be used to map the mass distribution in the supercluster and to obtain an estimate of the cosmological density parameter.