SCALING ANALYSIS OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF GALAXIES IN THE CFA CATALOG

A detailed analysis of the CfA1 catalog of galaxies by means of the mu ltifractal or scaling formalism is presented in this paper. The fair s ample hypothesis, the depth effect, and the problems of the luminosity and morphological segregation are extensively studied in volumes whic h differ by a factor of about 8 in size and of about 14 in number dens ity. The results of our calculation suggest that the CfA1 catalog is n ot a fair sample drawn from a hypothetical universal galaxy distributi on. Moreover, no depth effect has been found. Two kinds of (slight) lu minosity segregation could have been detected: one, due to a peculiar velocity contamination of bright galaxies which trace denser regions, and other, for field galaxies, which could be a manifestation of biasi ng. The morphological segregation is present not only in the cores of clusters, but also at larger scales and in the moderate density region s. Both the luminosity and morphological segregations are independent effects.