Nonuniform distribution of galaxies in very large scale

Spatial distribution of galaxies identified as intervening objects producing metal absorption lines in quasar spectra is investigated. Autocorrelation function is used to measure fluctuations of the distribution of these galaxies at cosmological distances. To improve statistics several sets of data spread in the literature are analysed simultaneously. Non-homogeneity of the observational material is carefully investigated and selection effects are modelled individually for each data set. After subtraction of effects introduced by observational bias the residual pair distribution exhibits statistically significant excess of pairs with separations up to ∼ 1000 Mpc, indicating the non-homogeneous distribution of matter at that scale. At still larger separations distribution of objects is uniform; for 1000 < r < 5000 Mpc amplitude of the autocorrelation function is consistent with zero, with typical upper limits averaged over 1000 Mpc bins equal to about 0.015.