Global structure of the Local Universe according to 2MRS survey

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the large-scale distribution of galaxies within 300 Mpc using the 2MRS survey, revealing a power-law correlation in galaxy density and comparing observations with simulations to understand the universe's structure.

Contribution

It provides a detailed statistical analysis of the global galaxy distribution in the Local Universe using the 2MRS survey, highlighting its unique features and methodological considerations.

Findings

Conditional density follows a power-law with slope ~1.0 from 0.1 to 100 Mpc

Galaxy distribution is independent of luminosity in the observed range

Comparison with simulations shows similarities and differences in galaxy clustering

Abstract

We report the results of a statistical analysis of the space distribution of galaxies within distances about 300 Mpc using the 2MRS catalog, which contains redshifts of 43533 galaxies of the 2MASS all-sky IR survey. Because of the unique features of the 2MRS survey, such as its 90 percent sky coverage, galaxy selection in the IR, the complete incorporation of the old stellar population of galaxies, weakness of the dust extinction effects, and the smallness of the k- and e-corrections allowed us to determine the statistical properties of the global distribution of galaxies in the Local Universe. We took into account the main methodological factors that distort the theoretically expected relations compared to those actually observed. We construct the radial galaxy number counts N(R), SL(R, r) statistics, and the complete correlation function (conditional density) for volume-limited (VL) galaxy samples. The observed conditional density in the redshift space is independent of the luminosity of galaxies and has the form of a power-law function with slope ~ 1.0 over a large range scale-length spanning from 0.1 to 100 Mpc. We compare the statistical properties of the space distribution of galaxies of the 2MRS catalog with the corresponding properties of simulated catalogs: stochastic fractal distributions and galaxies of the Millennium catalog.