Galaxy formation
Abstract
It is argued that within the standard Big Bang cosmological model the bulk of the mass of the luminous parts of the large galaxies likely had been assembled by redshift z ∼ 10. Galaxy assembly this early would be difficult to fit in the widely discussed adiabatic cold dark matter model for structure formation, but it could agree with an isocurvature version in which the cold dark matter is the remnant of a massive scalar field frozen (or squeezed) from quantum fluctuations during inflation. The squeezed field fluctuations would be Gaussian with zero mean, and the distribution of the field mass therefore would be the square of a random Gaussian process. This offers a possibly interesting new direction for the numerical exploration of models for cosmic structure formation.
Footnotes
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↵ † To whom reprint requests should be addressed. e-mail: pjep{at}pupgg.princeton.edu.
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This paper was presented at a colloquium entitled “The Age of the Universe, Dark Matter, and Structure Formation,” organized by David N. Schramm, held March 21–23, 1997, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences at the Beckman Center in Irvine, CA.
- ABBREVIATIONS:
- CDM,
- cold dark matter;
- CBR,
- cosmic background radiation
- Copyright © 1998, The National Academy of Sciences
