Gravitational Structure Formation, the Cosmological Problem and Statistical Physics

TL;DR

This paper explores the role of dark matter in cosmic structure formation, analyzing initial density fluctuations, gravitational dynamics, and galaxy correlations, drawing analogies with statistical physics to deepen understanding.

Contribution

It provides a critical examination of dark matter's influence on structure formation, integrating statistical physics concepts with cosmological models.

Findings

Initial density fields exhibit specific statistical properties.

Gravitational dynamics show complex non-linear behavior.

Galaxy distributions have characteristic correlation features.

Abstract

Models of structure formation in the universe postulate that matter distributions observed today in galaxy catalogs arise, through a complex non-linear dynamics, by gravitational evolution from a very uniform initial state. Dark matter plays the central role of providing the primordial density seeds which will govern the dynamics of structure formation. We critically examine the role of cosmological dark matter by considering three different and related issues: Basic statistical properties of theoretical initial density fields, several elements of the gravitational many-body dynamics and key correlation features of the observed galaxy distributions are discussed, stressing some useful analogies with known systems in modern statistical physics.