Studying Structure Formation With Large Galaxy Redshift Surveys

Abstract

I outline the connections between some of the most widely used statistical measures of galaxy clustering and the fundamental issues in the theory of structure formation. I devote particular attention to the problem of biasing, i.e. to a possible difference between the distribution of galaxies and the distribution of mass. Using numerical experiments, I show that a local morphology-density relation leads to different slopes and amplitudes for the correlation functions of different galaxy types on small scales, but that the correlation functions on large scales all have the same shape, differing only by constant factors. I also examine a variety of biasing models in which the efficiency of galaxy formation depends on local properties of the mass distribution. While these purely local influences do lead to a large-scale bias, in all cases the bias factor becomes constant on scales larger than the galaxy correlation length.