A simultaneous solution to the Hubble tension and observed bulk flow within 250 h−1 Mpc

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) standard cosmological model is in severe tension with several cosmological observations. Foremost is the Hubble tension, which exceeds 5σ confidence. Galaxy number counts show the Keenan–Barger–Cowie (KBC) supervoid, a significant underdensity out to 300 Mpc that cannot be reconciled with ΛCDM cosmology. Haslbauer et al. previously showed that a high local Hubble constant arises naturally due to gravitationally driven outflows from the observed KBC supervoid. The main prediction of this model is that peculiar velocities are typically much larger than expected in the ΛCDM framework. This agrees with the recent discovery by Watkins et al. that galaxies in the CosmicFlows-4 catalogue have significantly faster bulk flows than expected in the ΛCDM model on scales of $100-250 \, h^{-1}$ Mpc. The rising bulk flow curve is unexpected in standard cosmology, causing 4.8σ tension at $200 \, h^{-1}$ Mpc. In this work, we determine what the semi-analytic void model of Haslbauer et al. predicts for the bulk flows on these scales. We find qualitative agreement with the observations, especially if our vantage point is chosen to match the observed bulk flow on a scale of $50 \, h^{-1}$ Mpc. This represents a highly non-trivial success of a previously published model that was not constrained by bulk flow measurements, but which was shown to solve the Hubble tension and explain the KBC void consistently with the peculiar velocity of the Local Group. Our results suggest that several cosmological tensions can be simultaneously resolved if structure grows more efficiently than in the ΛCDM paradigm on scales of tens to hundreds of Mpc.