Eur. Phys. J. B 50, 285-289 (2006)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2006-00056-6

Gravitational structure formation, the cosmological problem and statistical physics

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università “La Sapienza”, P.le A. Moro 2, 00185 Rome, Italy
² ISC-CNR via dei Taurini, 19 00185 Rome, Italy
³ “E. Fermi” Center, via Panisperna 89 A, Compendio del Viminale, 00184 Rome, Italy

Corresponding author: ^a sylos@roma1.infn.it

Received: 11 October 2005
Revised: 18 November 2005
Published online: 16 February 2006

Abstract

Models of structure formation in the universe postulate that matter distributions observed today in galaxy catalogs arise, through a complex non-linear dynamics, by gravitational evolution from a very uniform initial state. Dark matter plays the central role of providing the primordial density seeds which will govern the dynamics of structure formation. We critically examine the role of cosmological dark matter by considering three different and related issues: Basic statistical properties of theoretical initial density fields, several elements of the gravitational many-body dynamics and key correlation features of the observed galaxy distributions are discussed, stressing some useful analogies with known systems in modern statistical physics.