The Caltech faint galaxy redshift survey. XII. Clustering of galaxies

A clustering analysis is performed on two samples of similar to 600 faint g alaxies each, in two widely separated regions of the sky, including the Hub ble Deep Field. One of the survey regions is configured so that some galaxy pairs span angular separations of up to 1 degrees. The median redshift is z(med) approximate to 0.55. Strong clustering is obvious, with every pencil -beam field containing a handful of narrow redshift-space features, corresp onding to galaxy structures with sizes of 5-20 Mpc. The structures are not obviously organized on planes, although one prominent, colinear triplet of structures is observed, spanning similar to 20 Mpc. This may be evidence of a filament. A galaxy-galaxy correlation function calculation is performed. No significant evolution of clustering (relative to stable clustering) is found in the redshift range 0.3 < z < 1.0. This is not surprising, since un certainties in the correlation amplitude estimated from surveys such as the se are large; field-to-field variations and covariances between data points are both shown to be significant. Consistent with other studies in this re dshift range, the galaxy-galaxy correlation length is found to be somewhat smaller than that predicted from local measurements and an assumption of no evolution. Galaxies with absorption-line-dominated spectra show much stron ger clustering at distances of <2 Mpc than typical field galaxies. There is some evidence for weaker clustering at intermediate redshift than at low r edshift, when the results presented here are compared with surveys of the l ocal universe. In subsets of the data, the measured pairwise velocity dispe rsion of galaxies ranges from 200 to 600 km s(-1), depending on the propert ies of the dominant redshift structures in each subset.