Strong angular clustering of very blue galaxies: Evidence of a low-redshift population

We have studied galaxy two-point angular correlations as a function of color using 4 m plate photometry in two independent fields. Each field consists of over 2900 galaxies with magnitudes 20 < B-J < 23.5 in an area of similar to 750 arcmin(2). We find that the autocorrelation amplitude of the bluest 15% of galaxies is surprisingly strong, with a relative increase in clustering amplitude of a factor of 6 over that of the complete data set, while exhibiting a power-law slope consistent with the canonical value of -0.8. These very blue galaxies are also found to be weakly correlated with galaxies of median color and marginally anticorrelated with the reddest subset. These correlation properties are incompatible with existing simple models of the galaxy distribution; they suggest that a significant fraction, more than 50%, of these very blue galaxies are a faint population that lies at nearby redshifts, z < 0.3.