QUASARS AND LARGE SCALE STRUCTURE OF THE UNIVERSE

Abstract

The majority of bright distant quasars $(z{}_{\sim }^{>}1)$ may form in massive mergers appearing in compact galaxy groups in/and young clusters. The expected tests are (i) large correlation signal for medium-$z$ QSOs $(1<z<2)$ and (ii) direct search for quasar groups (QGs) indicating positions of distant pre-superclusters which later will evolve to the "systems" like the local Great Attractor or Shapley concentration. We discuss large QGs with more than ten members within regions $\le l_{LS}\sim 100-150h^{-1}Mpc$, tracing the enhanced density regions at $z{}_{\sim }^{<}2$. These early large scale structures (i) provide a natural way to "bias" the distribution of Abell clusters, and (ii) suggest that the spectrum of primordial density perturbations is nearly flat at scales encompassing both cluster and GAs, $l=\pi k^{-1}\in (10,100)h^{-1}Mpc:{\Delta }_k^2\sim k^{3}P(k)\sim k^{\gamma },\gamma =1_{-0.4}^{+0.6}$.

5 pages, uuencoded Z-compressed postscript, contribution to the Proceedings of Rencontres de Moriond 1995 "Clustering in the Universe"