Studying the Peculiar Velocity Bulk Flow in a Sparse Survey of Type-Ia
  SNe
  Studies of the peculiar velocity bulk flow based on different tools and
datasets have been consistent so far in their estimation of the direction of
the flow, which also happens to lie in close proximity to several features
identified in the cosmic microwave background, providing motivation to use new
compilations of type-Ia supernovae measurements to pinpoint it with better
accuracy and up to higher redshift. Unfortunately, the peculiar velocity field
estimated from the most recent Union2.1 compilation suffers from large
individual errors, poor sky coverage and low redshift-volume density. We show
that as a result, any naive attempt to calculate the best-fit bulk flow and its
significance will be severely biased. Instead, we introduce an iterative method
which calculates the amplitude and the scatter of the direction of the best-fit
bulk flow as deviants are successively removed and take into account the
sparsity of the data when estimating the significance of the result. Using 200
supernovae up to a redshift of z=0.2, we find that while the amplitude of the
bulk flow is marginally consistent with the value expected in a LCDM universe
given the large bias, the scatter of the direction is significantly low (at >=
99.5 C.L.) when compared to random simulations, supporting the quest for a
cosmological origin.
