Back to the article index

Article Contents

ABSTRACT

1.PHYSICAL COSMOLOGY

1.1.Cross-disciplinary physics

1.2.Statistical mechanics

1.3.Scaling laws in physics

1.4.Some psychological issues

2.THE COSMIC SETTING

2.1.Key factors

2.2.Some caveats

3.EARLY IDEAS ABOUT THE GALAXY DISTRIBUTION

3.1.Cosmogony

3.2.Galaxies as "Island Universes"

3.3.Earliest impressions on galaxy clustering

3.4.Hierarchical models

3.5.The cosmological principle

4.DISCOVERING COSMIC STRUCTURE

4.1.Early catalog builders

4.2.Redshift Surveys

4.3.The first generation of redshift surveys

4.4.Recent and on-going Surveys

4.5.The radio, X-ray and Gamma-ray skies

4.6.Distribution of quasars and Ly-alpha clouds

4.7.The cosmic microwave background

5.MEASUREMENTS OF CLUSTERING

5.1.The discovery of power-law clustering

5.2.The correlation function: galaxies

5.3.Galaxy-galaxy and cluster-cluster correlations

5.4.The pairwise velocity dispersion

5.5.Light does not trace mass

6.FURTHER CLUSTERING MEASURES

6.1.Higher order correlation functions

6.2.Three-point correlation functions

6.3.The power spectrum

6.4.The bispectrum

6.5.Fractal descriptors of clustering

7.CLUSTERING MODELS

7.1.Cosmological simulations

7.2.Statistical models

7.3.Dynamical models

7.4.Hydrodynamic models for clustering

7.5.Nonlinear dynamic models

8.CONCLUDING REMARKS

8.1.About scaling

8.2.Future data gathering

8.3.Understanding structure

8.4.About simulations

8.5.Where we stand on theory

8.6.And finally ...

REFERENCES