The Galaxy Counts-in-cells Distribution from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Abstract
We determine the galaxy counts-in-cells distribution from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) for three-dimensional spherical cells in redshift space as well as for two-dimensional projected cells. We find that cosmic variance in the SDSS causes the counts-in-cells distributions in different quadrants to differ from each other by up to 20%. We also find that within this cosmic variance, the overall galaxy counts-in-cells distribution agrees with both the gravitational quasi-equilibrium distribution and the negative binomial distribution. We also find that brighter galaxies are more strongly clustered than if they were randomly selected from a larger complete sample that includes galaxies of all luminosities. The results suggest that bright galaxies could be in dark matter halos separated by less than ~10 h -1 Mpc.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal
- Pub Date:
- March 2011
- DOI:
- 10.1088/0004-637X/729/2/123
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1009.0013
- Bibcode:
- 2011ApJ...729..123Y
- Keywords:
-
- cosmology: theory;
- galaxies: statistics;
- gravitation;
- large-scale structure of universe;
- Astrophysics - Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. Revised version with referee suggestions and corrected typos