Testing Isotropy in the Local Universe

Understand

We test the isotropy of the local distribution of galaxies using the 2MASS extended source catalogue.

• By decomposing the full sky survey into distinct patches and using a combination of photometric and spectroscopic redshift data, we use both parametric and non-parametric methods to obtain the shape of the luminosity function in each patch.
• We use the shape of the luminosity function to test the statistical isotropy of the underlying galaxy distribution.
• The parametric estimator shows some evidence of a hemispherical asymmetry in the north/south Galactic plane.