Related papers: Fingers of God
Recent observations suggest that Hubble's constant is large, and hence that the Universe appears to be younger than some of its constituents. The traditional escape route, which assumes that the expansion is accelerating, appears to be…
Peculiar velocities of clusters of galaxies can be measured by studying the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) generated by the scattering of the microwave photons by the hot X-ray emitting gas inside clusters. While for…
In the last decade star clusters have been found in the centers of spiral galaxies across all Hubble types. We here present a spectroscopic study of the exceptionally bright (10^6 - 10^8 Lsun) but compact (Re ~ 5 pc) nuclear star clusters…
Many galaxies appear to have taken on their familiar appearance relatively recently. In the distant Universe, galaxy morphology started to deviate significantly (and systematically) from that of nearby galaxies at redshifts, z, as low as z…
The large scale distribution of galaxies in the universe displays a complex pattern of clusters, super-clusters, filaments and voids with sizes limited only by the boundaries of the available samples. A quantitative statistical…
We describe the results of a search for galaxies with large (> 350 km/s) velocity dispersions. The largest systems we have found appear to be the extremes of the early-type galaxy population: compared to other galaxies with similar…
High surface density, rapidly star-forming galaxies are observed to have $\approx 50-100\,{\rm km\,s^{-1}}$ line-of-sight velocity dispersions, which are much higher than expected from supernova driving alone, but may arise from large-scale…
Present day estimates of the Hubble constant based on Cepheids and on the cosmic microwave background radiation are uncertain by roughly 10% (on the conservative assumption that the universe may not be PERFECTLY flat). Gravitational lens…
The validity of Hubble's law defies the determination of the center of the big bang expansion, even if it exists. Every point in the expanding universe looks like the center from which the rest of the universe flies away. In this article,…
Most stars form in compact, dense embedded clusters with memberships ranging from a dozen stars to many millions of stars. Embedded clusters containing more than a few hundred stars also contain O stars that disrupt the nebula abruptly.…
We give the first determination of the observed peculiar velocity distribution function for a representative sample of galaxies (within 50 Mpc (H=100) of the Local Group), which includes a wide range of clustering properties. We explore in…
It is pointed out that if gravitational interactions among ordinary bodies propagate in extra space-time dimensions the velocity of gravitational waves in vacuum could be different from the speed of light $c$.
I critically discuss in a pedagogical and phenomenological way a few crucial tests challenging the claims by Pietronero and collaborators that there is no evidence from available galaxy catalogues that the Universe is actually homogeneous…
The accelerating expansion of the Universe at recent epochs has called into question the validity of general relativity on cosmological scales. One probe of gravity is a comparison of expansion history of the Universe with the history of…
We employ a high-resolution dissipationless N-body simulation of a galaxy cluster to investigate the impact of subhalo selection on the resulting velocity distributions. Applying a lower limit on the present bound mass of subhalos leads to…
Using a simple model, we study the effects of turbulence on the motion of bubbles produced by AGN jet activities in the core of a galaxy cluster. We focus on the turbulence with scales larger then the size of the bubbles. We show that for a…
A galaxy system must have a minimum velocity dispersion for its mass to be greater than the sum of the masses of its galaxies. Nearly half of the nearby Hickson compact groups (HCGs) have too low a velocity dispersion in comparison with the…
We present the stellar velocity dispersion measurements for 5 Luminous Compact Galaxies (LCGs) at z=0.5-0.7. These galaxies are vigorously forming stars with average SFR $\sim$ 40 M$_{\odot}$/yr. We find that their velocity dispersions…
We have investigated the possibility of inferring peculiar velocities for clusters of galaxies from the Doppler shift of scattered cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons. We find that if the core radius of the gas distribution or the…
The local galaxy distribution offers an interesting constraint to cosmological models of structure formation. The galaxies are distributed in a long, filamentary structure, presumably the result of large amplitude gravitational instability,…