F. Distribution of quasars and
Ly- clouds
The spectra of quasars are populated by narrow absorption lines
from intervening gas clouds along the line of sight (the
Ly- forest). Owing to
the great redshift of most quasars
these absorption clouds provide an important probe of clustering
at large distances and at times long in our past.
Wu et al. (1999)
used the large-scale uniformity of the
Ly- forest to argue
against fractal distribution of matter. Recently,
Croft et al. (2002)
showed that it is possible to
estimate the full 3-D power spectrum of density fluctuations
P(k) from the (one-dimensional)
Ly-
flux power spectrum.
This is extremely important, as it allows us to check for
theoretical predictions at large redshifts (z
2-4). It
also allows us to recover the linear (post-recombination) power
spectrum for small scales, which have turned nonlinear by now.
Lines of sight to quasar pairs, be they optical pairs or pairs that are a consequence of gravitational lensing, provide additional clues to the clustering transverse to the line of sight (Wu et al., 1999).
The statistical analysis of the distribution of quasars and
Ly- clouds has provided
additional evidence for the large scale homogeneity in the universe
(Andreani et
al., 1991,
Carbone and Savaglio,
1996).