The Great Attractor as a Trajectory: A Testable Prediction of Residual Vorticity in the Local Peculiar Velocity Field
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: The bulk motion of the Local Group and the Laniakea supercluster toward the Great Attractor region is usually interpreted as gravitational infall toward a mass overdensity. This note proposes examining an alternative reading: that of an orbital component, i.e. a trajectory with a transverse rather than purely radial motion, understood as the local manifestation of a residual cosmological vorticity. This framework, referred to here as the mycelial hypothesis, belongs to the class of shear-free Gödel-type global rotation models, the only ones compatible with isotropy bounds from the cosmic microwave background, and assumes a non-rigid vorticity with misaligned local axes. It yields a discriminating prediction: the standard model predicts that the large-scale peculiar velocity field derives from a potential and therefore has vanishing curl at linear order, whereas a residual vorticity predicts a non-zero curl, coherent in amplitude and incoherent in direction. Treating the vorticity implied by the bulk motion of Laniakea as a calibrated parameter, the model yields a predicted amplitude of about 1.5 km/s/Mpc, to be confronted with the public Cosmicflows-4 dataset. An explicit refutation criterion is stated, together with a secondary prediction concerning the chirality of spiral galaxies. The binding component is further placed quantitatively within dark-energy parameter space: structuring at filament scales requires an effective sound speed of order 1e-6 to 1e-5, i.e. the cold dark energy regime.
Author: Wendling, Cesar-Emmanuel
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225591950