THE DISTRIBUTION OF GALAXIES WITHIN THE GREAT WALL

We examine the galaxy distribution within the "Great Wall," the most striking feature in the first three "slices" of the CfA redshift survey extension. We extract the Great Wall from the sample and analyze it by counting galaxies in cells. We compute the "local" two-point correlation function within the Great Wall and estimate the local correlation length, s0GW. We obtain s0GW congruent-to 15 h-1 Mpc, approximately 3 times larger than the correlation length for the entire sample (de Lapparent et al.). The redshift distribution of galaxies in the pencil-beam survey by Broadhurst et al. shows peaks separated by large "voids," at least to a redshift z congruent-to 0.3. The peaks might represent the intersections of their approximately 5 h-1 Mpc pencil beams with structures similar to the Great Wall (Broadhurst et al.). Under this hypothesis, sampling of the Great Wall shows that l congruent-to 12 h-1 Mpc is the minimum projected beam size required to detect all the "walls" at redshifts between the peak of the selection function and the effective depth of the survey. (We use a Hubble constant H0 = 100 h km s-1 Mpc.