Jim Peebles & formation

Yesterday, Jim Peebles gave a nice talk about possible anomalies in the standard model of structure formation and possible remedies in the dark sector. He showed many pictures of colliding and other galaxies, and so forth. The main technical hypothesis was that there is an equivalence-principle violating fifth force caused by a massive scalar that only couples to the dark sector. The inverse mass is comparable to 1 megaparsec. Such a new force would allow to empty the voids more efficiently. I've already described these ideas after Steve Gubser's talk.




What I found really new, interesting, and simple enough was the autocorrelation of galaxies. If you draw the number of galaxies with a given angular separation theta as a function of theta, you will find that for moderately small angles, you obtain an almost exact power law with the exponent -1.77. This means that the distribution of galaxies behaves as a fractal whose Hausdorff dimension is another fractional number. In my opinion, there could exist a rather robust explanation of this exponent. Any ideas?