A statistical comparison of voids in the galaxy distribution and n-body simulations
Barbara Ryden, Edwin L. Turner · The Astrophysical Journal · 1984
A quantitative statistical comparison is made between the voids in the three-dimensional galaxy distribution and several n-body simulations. The statistic used is the distribution of the distances to the nearest neighboring galaxy from each point in a regular grid filling space. This statistic is calculated for two volume-limited samples of galaxies and for a magnitude-limited sample in which the distances are corrected to eliminate the effect of the selection bias on the observed density of galaxies. It is found, using a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, that the voids in the galaxy distribution are significantly larger than voids in the n-body simulations. The largest voids in the volume-limited galaxy samples have radii equal to about 2-3 times the inverse cube root of the mean galaxy density.