Gravitational Binding, Virialization and the Peculiar Velocity Distribution of the Galaxies

Abstract

We examine the peculiar velocity distribution function of galaxies in cosmological many-body gravitational clustering. Our statistical mechanical approach derives a previous basic assumption and generalizes earlier results to galaxies with haloes. Comparison with the observed peculiar velocity distributions indicates that individual massive galaxies are usually surrounded by their own haloes, rather than being embedded in common haloes. We then derive the density of energy states, giving the probability that a randomly chosen configuration of N galaxies in space is bound and virialized. Gravitational clustering is very efficient. The results agree well with the observed probabilities for finding nearby groups containing N galaxies. A consequence is that our local relatively low mass group is quite typical, and the observed small departures from the local Hubble flow beyond our group are highly probable.

arXiv commentPaper in aastex 5.0 format and 9 figures. Replace a new version with figures and typos corrected

References in corpus (7)

• Large-Scale Structure of the Universe and Cosmological Perturbation Theory
• Homogeneous Velocity-Distance Data for Peculiar Velocity Analysis. III. The Mark III Catalog of Galaxy Peculiar Velocities
• Maximum-Likelihood Comparisons of Tully-Fisher and Redshift Data. II. Results from an Expanded Sample
• The Local Group as a test of cosmological models
• The local Hubble flow: a manifestation of dark energy
• Evolution of the Luminosity Function and Colors of Galaxies in a Lambda-CDM Universe
• The observed distribution function of peculiar velocities of galaxies

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Evaluating backreaction with the peak model of structure formation
• The expansion field: The value of H_0
• An estimation of local bulk flow with the maximum-likelihood method
• The galaxy counts-in-cells distribution from the SDSS
• Effects of Cosmological Constant on Clustering of Galaxies
• Clustering of Galaxies with Dynamical Dark Energy
• The Galaxy Distribution Function from the 2MASS Survey
• Large Distance Modification of Newtonian Potential and Structure Formation in Universe
• The Spatial Distribution Function of Galaxies at High Redshift
• Shapes and Probabilities of Galaxy Clusters
• Shapes and Probabilities of Galaxy Clusters II: Comparisons with observations