A Large Structure of Galaxies at Redshift z ~ 3 and Its Cosmological Implications

We report the discovery of a highly significant concentration of galaxies at a redshift of ⟨z⟩ = 3.090. The structure is evident in a redshift histogram of photometrically selected "Lyman-break" objects in a 9' by 18' field in which we have obtained 78 spectroscopic redshifts in the range 2.0 ≤ z ≤ 3.4. The dimensions of the structure projected on the plane of the sky are at least 11' by 8', or 14 h−170 by 10 h−170 Mpc (comoving; ΩM = 1). The concentration contains 15 galaxies and one faint (ℛ=21.7) QSO. We consider the structure in the context of a number of cosmological models and argue that Lyman-break galaxies must be very biased tracers of mass, with an effective bias on mass scale M ~ 1015 M☉ ranging from b ~ 2 for ΩM = 0.2 to b ≳ 6 for ΩM = 1. In a cold dark matter scenario, the large bias values suggest that individual Lyman-break galaxies are associated with dark halos of mass M ~ 1012 M☉, reinforcing the interpretation of these objects as the progenitors of massive galaxies at the present epoch. Preliminary results of spectroscopy in additional fields suggest that such large structures are common at z ~ 3, with about one similar structure per survey field. The implied space density is consistent with the possibility that we are observing moderately rich clusters of galaxies in their early nonlinear evolution. Finally, the spectrum of one of the QSOs discovered in our survey (zem = 3.356) exhibits metal-line absorption systems within the three redshift bins having the largest number of galaxies in field, z = 2.93, 3.09, and 3.28. These results are the first from an ongoing "targeted" redshift survey designed to explore the nature and distribution of star-forming galaxies in the redshift range 2.7 ≲ z ≲ 3.4.