Confronting cold dark matter cosmologies with strong clustering of Lyman break galaxies at z∼3
Abstract
We perform a detailed analysis of the statistical significance of a concentration of Lyman break galaxies at
z∼3
recently discovered by Steidel et al. (1997), using a series of N-body simulations with
N=
256
3
particles in a $(100\himpc)^3$ comoving box. While the observed number density of Lyman break galaxies at
z∼3
implies that they correspond to systems with dark matter halos of $\simlt 10^{12}M_\odot$, the resulting clustering of such objects on average is not strong enough to be reconciled with the concentration if it is fairly common; we predict one similar concentration approximately per (
6∼10
) fields in three representative cold dark matter models. Considering the current observational uncertainty of the frequency of such clustering at
z∼3
, it would be premature to rule out the models, but the future spectroscopic surveys in a dozen fields could definitely challenge all the existing cosmological models a posteriori fitted to the
z=0
universe.