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The Cosmological principle and a frame that does not exist.
The largest anisotropic feature of the Cosmic Microwave Background is the dipole, believed to originate from the relative motion of the heliocentric frame with a velocity of ~369 km s^-1 with respect to the ‘rest frame of the Universe’ in standard cosmology. This should cause a dipolar modulation in the number counts of distant sources, through special relativistic aberration and Doppler boosting effects. 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, rejecting the exclusively kinematic interpretation of the CMB dipole at conservative statistical significances as high as 4.9 sigma. These and other observations hint at a bulk flow of matter in the local Universe, extending out to scales larger than is typical in \Lambda CDM N-body simulations. Convergence to the CMB rest frame has never been demonstrated and this frame does not seem to exist in any meaningful sense in the real Universe. A predicted relativistic 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 SN1a data and find such a modulation at ~3.9 sigma statistical significance, while the evidence for any isotropic acceleration of the Universe simultaneously drops to <1.4 sigma. These observations suggest that dark energy is an artefact of our idealized cosmological model, and challenge the ontology of the modern Copernican principle.