THE DENSITY FIELD OF THE LOCAL UNIVERSE

An all-sky redshift survey of galaxies detected by IRAS (the Infrared Astronomical Satellite) has been used to map the Universe out to 140h-1 Mpc (the Hubble constant H(o) = 100h km s-1 Mpc-1). Well-known superclusters and voids are seen, as are others not previously identified. The inferred underlying distribution of density is found to be skewed to high densities (the voids are larger than the superclusters but depart less from the mean density); and there is more structure on large scales than is predicted by the standard cold dark matter theory of galaxy formation.