Salle du Conseil, Bâtiment PERRAULT, Observatoire de Paris
Why Galaxies cluster
William C. Saslaw
Cambridge
Résumé :
The clustering of galaxies is an old idea which was understood
qualitatively by Newton and Herschel, even before the nebulae were
definitely known to be galaxies.
In the last two decades, we have been able to relate the observed
distribution of galaxies to the gravitational dynamics of the cosmological
many-body problem.
In the last two years, earlier results derived from gravitational
thermodynamics have been generalized and rederived from statistical
mechanics, including an exact solution for the relevant gravitational
many-body partition function. In the last few months, we have been
working on the peculiar velocity function of galaxies, and its
implications for the distribution of dark matter.
