Related papers: Is the Universe Homogeneous on Large Scales?
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…
This comment is in response to the paper by L. Guzzo recently appeared in ``New Astronomy'' related to our work. The subject of the discussion concerns the correlation properties of galaxy distribution in the available 3-d samples. There is…
Despite the observational evidence that the Universe appears hierarchically structured up to a distance of at least 30 Mpc/h (and possibly up to 100 Mpc/h), the fractal paradigm has not yet been recognized by the majority of cosmologists…
The properties of spatial distribution of luminous matter are investigated analysing all the available three dimensional catalogues of galaxies. In standard view, galaxies are believed to have a fractal distribution at small scale with a…
Some years ago we proposed a new approach for the analysis of galaxy and cluster correlations based on the concepts and methods of modern statistical physics. This led to the surprising result that galaxy correlations are fractal and not…
Counts of galaxies as a function of apparent magnitude are among the most time-honored observations in cosmology. In this Letter, we focus on some statistical properties of these counts which are fundamental in order to characterize the…
The aim of this review article is to give a comprehensive description of the scaling properties detected for the distribution of cosmic structures. Due to the great variety of statistical methods to describe the large-scale structure of the…
The properties of the galaxy distribution at large scales are usually studied using statistics which are assumed to be self-averaging inside a given sample. We present a new analysis able to quantitatively map galaxy large scale structures…
The fact that galaxy distribution exhibits fractal properties is well established since twenty years. Nowadays, the controversy concerns the range of the fractal regime, the value of the fractal dimension and the eventual presence of a…
There is a general agreement that galaxy structures exhibit fractal properties, at least up to some small scale. However the presence of an eventual crossover towards homogenization, as well as the exact value of the fractal dimension, are…
New measurements of galaxy clustering and background radiations provide improved constraints on the isotropy and homogeneity of the Universe on large scales. In particular, the angular distribution of radio sources and the X-Ray Background…
These lecture notes concentrate on a few specific topics concerning the distribution of galaxies on scales from 0.1 to nearly 1000/h Mpc. The main aim is to provide the students with the information and tools to familiarize with a few basic…
We investigate the behaviour of galaxy clustering on large scales using the PSCz catalogue. In particular, we ask whether there is any evidence of large-scale fractal behaviour in this catalogue. We find the correlation dimension in this…
The assumption that the Universe, on sufficiently large scales, is homogeneous and isotropic is crucial to our current understanding of cosmology. In this paper we test if the observed galaxy distribution is actually homogeneous on large…
Recent results from a number of redshift surveys suggest that the Universe is well described by an inhomogeneous, fractal distribution on the largest scales probed. This distribution has been found to have fractal dimension, D,…
Some years ago we proposed a new approach to the analysis of galaxy and cluster correlations based on the concepts and methods of modern statistical Physics. This led to the surprising result that galaxy correlations are fractal and not…
This paper presents an analysis of the smoothness problem in cosmology by focussing on the ambiguities originated in the simplifying hypotheses aimed at observationally verifying if the large-scale distribution of galaxies is homogeneous,…
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…
Over the past two decades or so, it has become increasingly appparent that, out to quite large distances, galaxies are distributed in a quasi-fractal fashion with fractal dimension $D \approx 2$. Whether or not this behaviour continues onto…
We have carried out a multi-fractal analysis of the distribution of galaxies in the three Northern slices of the Las Campanas Redshift Survey. Our method takes into account the selection effects and the complicated geometry of the survey.…