THE POWER SPECTRUM IN A STRONGLY INHOMOGENOUS UNIVERSE

The standard picture of the matter clustering, the cold dark matter mo del (and its variants), assumes that, on scales smaller than a certain ''flattening scale'' lambda(f), the power spectrum increases with the scale, while on much larger scales it decreases so as to match the ti ny fluctuations observed in the microwave background. However, there i s no consensus on whether the turnaround lambda(f) has been detected o r not, and on the actual importance of the luminosity segregation effe ct. We show that, due to the finiteness of the sample, the standard an alysis applied to fractal distributions yields a turnaround for scales close to the survey scale, and a systematic amplitude shift with the survey scale. We point out that both features, bending and scaling, ar e in agreement with recent determinations of the power spectrum, in pa rticular with the CfA2 spectrum in redshift space. Therefore, our conc lusion is that the CfA2 sample is consistent with a fractal clustering .