Is Galaxy Distribution Non-extensive and Non-Gaussian?

Abstract

Self gravitating systems (SGS) in the Universe are generally thought to be non-extensive, and often show long-tails in various distribution functions. In principle, these non-Boltzmann properties are naturally expected from the peculiar property of gravity, long-range and unshielded. Therefore the ordinary Boltzmann statistical mechanics would not be applicable for these self gravitating systems (SGS) in its naive form. In order to step further, we quantitatively investigate the above two properties, non-extensivity and long-tails, by explicitly introducing various models of statistical mechanics. We use the data of CfA II South redshift survey and apply the count-in-cell method. We study four statistical mechanics, (1) Boltzmann, (2) Fractal, (3) Rényi, and (4) Tsallis, and use Akaike information criteria (AIC) for the fair comparison.