The clustering of faint galaxies

Abstract

Deep images of the sky have revealed a population of faint blue objects that may be protogalaxies at redshifts z ~> 1. In this letter we show that these faint galaxies are surprisingly weakly clustered. There are several possible explanations of this result: (1) the majority of the faint blue galaxies belong to a new population that is weakly clustered and intrinsically faint at the present epoch; (2) galaxy clustering evolves much more rapidly than expected in simple models of gravitational instability; or (3) the geometry of the universe differs significantly from the Einstein-de Sitter model.