Scaling laws in the stellar mass distribution and the transition to homogeneity

Understand

We present a new statistical analysis of the large-scale stellar mass distribution in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (data release 7).

• A set of volume-limited samples shows that the stellar mass of galaxies is concentrated in a range of galaxy luminosities that is very different from the range selected by the usual analysis of galaxy positions.
• Nevertheless, the two-point correlation function is a power-law with the usual exponent $\gamma=1.71$--$1.82$, which varies with luminosity.
• The mass concentration property allows us to make a meaningful analysis of the angular distribution of the full flux-limited sample.