The local extragalactic velocity field, the local mean mass density, and biased galaxy formation

In this paper, a relationship is derived between the local mass density and the perturbation of the local Hubble flow. The local mass density is estimated by the method used in the Virgocentric flow. The infrared Tully-Fisher relation of Aaronson et al. (1982) is used to find limits on the gravitational perturbation to the local Hubble flow and bright galaxy counts (N) are used to estimate the local galaxy concentration. It is concluded that if mass is proportional to N, with no fluctuations, and the local mass per galaxy is a fair sample, then the density parameter is roughly 0.1, consistent with other dynamical estimates and inconsistent with the naive interpretation of biasing which accounts for the low apparent mass density derived from clustering dynamics by the assumption that the mass per galaxy is unusually low in the regions of high density where clustering has been studied.