The Cosmological Principle and the missing rest frame of the Universe

The largest anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background is the dipole, believed to originate from our relative motion at ~369 km s-1 with respect to the ‘rest frame of the Universe’. This should also cause a dipolar modulation in the number counts of distant sources. We test this with various all-sky catalogues: NVSS and SUMSS radio galaxies, WISE galaxies and CatWISE quasars, consistently finding a significantly larger dipole than expected. Thus we reject the exclusively kinematic interpretation of the CMB dipole with statistical significances as high as 4.9 sigma. This and other observations imply a bulk flow of matter in the local Universe, extending out to scales much larger than is typical in \Lambda CDM and showing no convergence to the CMB rest frame. A predicted consequence of such a bulk flow is a scale-dependent dipolar modulation in the deceleration parameter measured from within the flow. We look for this in the SDSS-II/SNLS-III Joint lightcurve analysis compilation of SN Ia data and find it at ~3.9 sigma statistical significance, while the evidence for any isotropic simultaneously drops to < 1.4 sigma. These observations suggest that dark energy is an artefact of our idealized cosmological model and the Hubble ‘constant’ cannot be measured to a precision less than ~10%.