| Testing the Hubble Law with the IRAS 1.2 Jy Redshift Survey (2009) | |||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||
| We test and reject the claim of Segal et al. (1993) that the correlation of redshifts and ux densities in a complete sample of IRAS galaxies favors a quadratic redshift-distance relation over the linear Hubble law. This is done, in e ect, by treating the entire galaxy luminosity function as derived from the 60-m 1.2 Jy IRAS redshift survey of Fisher et al. (1995) as a distance indicator; equivalently, we compare the ux density distribution of galaxies as a function of redshift with predictions under di erent redshift-distance cosmologies, under the assumption of a universal luminosity function. This method does not assume a uniform distribution of galaxies in space. We nd that this test has rather weak discriminatory power, as argued by Petrosian (1993), and the di erences between models are not as stark as one might expect a priori. Even so, we nd that the Hubble law is indeed more strongly supported by the analysis than is the quadratic redshift-distance relation. We identify a bias in the the Segal et al. determination of the luminosity function, which could lead one to mistakenly favor the quadratic redshift-distance law. We also present several complementary analyses of the density eld of the sample; the galaxy density eld is found to be close to homogeneous on large scales if the Hubble law is assumed, while this is not the case with the quadratic redshift-distance relation. Subject headings: 1. | |||||||||||||
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