Peculiar velocities of objects in the nearby universe are correlated due to the gravitational pull of large-scale structure .
By measuring these velocities , we have a unique opportunity to test the cosmological model at the lowest redshifts .
We perform this test , using current data to constrain the amplitude of the “ signal ” covariance matrix describing the velocities and their correlations .
We consider a new , well-calibrated “ Supercal ” set of low-redshift SNe Ia as well as a set of distances derived from the fundamental plane relation of 6dFGS galaxies .
Analyzing the SN and galaxy data separately , both results are consistent with the peculiar velocity signal of our fiducial \Lambda CDM model , ruling out the noise-only model with zero peculiar velocities at greater than 7 \sigma ( SNe ) and 8 \sigma ( galaxies ) .
When the two data sets are combined appropriately , the precision of the test increases slightly , resulting in a constraint on the signal amplitude of A = 1.05 _ { -0.21 } ^ { +0.25 } , where A = 1 corresponds to our fiducial model .
Equivalently , we report an 11 % measurement of the product of the growth rate and amplitude of mass fluctuations evaluated at z _ { \text { eff } } = 0.02 , f \sigma _ { 8 } = 0.428 _ { -0.045 } ^ { +0.048 } , valid for our fiducial \Lambda CDM model .
We explore the robustness of the results to a number of conceivable variations in the analysis and find that individual variations shift the preferred signal amplitude by less than \sim 0.5 \sigma .
We briefly discuss our Supercal SN Ia results in comparison with our previous results using the JLA compilation .