The Visible Universe at the Light of Modern Statistical Physics

Abstract

In the last years there has been a growing interest in the understanding a vast variety of scale invariant and critical phenomena occurring in nature. Experiments and observations indeed suggest that many physical systems develop spontaneously correlations with power law behaviour both in space and time. Pattern formation, aggregation phenomena, biological systems, geological systems, disordered materials, clustering of matter in the universe are just some of the fields in which scale invariance has been observed as a common and basic feature. However, the fact that certain structures exhibit fractal and complex properties does not tell us why this happens. A crucial point to understand is therefore the origin of the general scale-invariance of natural phenomena. This would correspond to the understanding of the origin of fractal structures and of the properties of Self- Organized Criticality (SOC) from the knowledge of the microscopic physical processes at the basis of these phenomena. Fractal geometry can play a crucial role in extracting the correct physical properties from experimental data. In particular, the recent availability of complete three dimensional samples of galaxies and clusters permits a direct study of their spatial properties. We present a brief review of galaxy correlations based on the methods of modern Statistical Physics. These methods are able to identify self-similar and non-analytical properties, and allow us to test the usual homogeneity assumption of luminous matter distribution. The new analysis shows that all the available data are consistent with each other and show fractal correlations (with dimension $D \simeq 2$) up to the deepest scales probed until now ($1000 \hmp$)