A study of the large-scale distribution of galaxies in the South Galactic Pole region -- II. Further evidence for a preferential clustering scale?

We analyse a set of new pencil-beam galaxy redshift data in three smallregions around the South Galactic Pole (SGP) area. We investigate whether wecan find any evidence of the quasi-periodic peaks discovered by Broadhurst etal. (1990) in the distribution of galaxies along the NGP-SGP directions. We useboth a power spectrum analysis and a cross-correlation with a sliding comb-likewindow (the comb-template technique). Despite the data are less deep (~600h^{-1} Mpc) and certainly not optimal for such an investigation, there isevidence of the same preferential ~130 h^{-1} Mpc scale in two fields displacedrespectively 15 and 30 degrees West of the Broadhurst et al. original probe.Taken alone, however, this peak would not be statistically distinguishable froma noise fluctuation. Nevertheless, the statistical significance of thedetection raises to 99% when one considers the CONDITIONAL probability offinding a peak around THE SAME scale measured by Broadhurst et al.Comment: 5 LaTeX mn-style pages plus 3 tables and 7 PS figures, uses mn.sty, accepted for publication in MNRA