2000/06/30 by David W. Hogg, Judith G. Cohen, R. D. Blandford +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics #Brightest cluster galaxy #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Galaxy cluster #Galaxy formation and evolution #Lenticular galaxy #Physics #Redshift #Redshift survey #Scientific Research and Discoveries #Velocity dispersion #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/317779
published as Astron.J. 120 (2000) 2082 · accepted for publication in the ApJ
arxiv created 2000/08/11 · openalex publication_date 2000/12/10 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
A clustering analysis is performed on two samples of ~600 faint galaxies each, in two widely separated regions of the sky, including the Hubble Deep Field. One of the survey regions is configured so that some galaxy pairs span angular separations of up to 1°. The median redshift is z med ≈ 0.55. Strong clustering is obvious, with every pencil-beam field containing a handful of narrow redshift-space features, corresponding to galaxy structures with sizes of 5-20 Mpc. The structures are not obviously organized on planes, although one prominent, colinear triplet of structures is observed, spanning ~20 Mpc. This may be evidence of a filament. A galaxy-galaxy correlation function calculation is performed. No significant evolution of clustering (relative to stable clustering) is found in the redshift range 0.3 < z < 1.0. This is not surprising, since uncertainties in the correlation amplitude estimated from surveys such as these are large; field-to-field variations and covariances between data points are both shown to be significant. Consistent with other studies in this redshift range, the galaxy-galaxy correlation length is found to be somewhat smaller than that predicted from local measurements and an assumption of no evolution. Galaxies with absorption-line-dominated spectra show much stronger clustering at distances of <2 Mpc than typical field galaxies. There is some evidence for weaker clustering at intermediate redshift than at low redshift, when the results presented here are compared with surveys of the local universe. In subsets of the data, the measured pairwise velocity dispersion of galaxies ranges from 200 to 600 km s -1 , depending on the properties of the dominant redshift structures in each subset.