Peculiar motions, accelerated expansion and the cosmological axis
  Peculiar velocities change the expansion rate of any observer moving relative
to the smooth Hubble flow. As a result, observers in a galaxy like our Milky
Way can experience accelerated expansion within a globally decelerating
universe, even when the drift velocities are small. The effect is local, but
the affected scales can be large enough to give the false impression that the
whole cosmos has recently entered an accelerating phase. Generally, peculiar
velocities are also associated with dipole-like anisotropies, triggered by the
fact that they introduce a preferred spatial direction. This implies that
observers experiencing locally accelerated expansion, as a result of their own
drift motion, may also find that the acceleration is maximised in one direction
and minimised in the opposite. We argue that, typically, such a dipole
anisotropy should be relatively small and the axis should probably lie fairly
close to the one seen in the spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background.
