The Large-Scale Distribution of Matter in the Universe

Abstract

At the present time the distribution of matter in the universe is highly inhomogeneous (there are planets, the sun, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on). Astrophysicists nowadays think that in the early stages of the development of the universe there was no such inhomogeneity. How did it come about? Ya. B. Zel’dovich in 1970 proposed an explanation of the formation of clusters of dustlike material that is mathematically equivalent to the analysis of the formation of singularities of caustics begun in 1963 by E. M. Lifshitz, Khalatnikov and Sudakov.