Fingers of God

Abstract

Very long wavelength universal gravitational waves cannot now produce in clusters of galaxies velocity dispersions greater than that which these systems would possess if they were expanding with the Universe, if the Universe is not younger than $10^{10}$ yr and Hubble's constant is not less than 50 km/sec/ Mpc. A diagram shows that actual velocity dispersions are significantly greater than this limit.Comment: Published long before the advent of large-scale redshift surveys, as "A Critique of Rees's Theory of Primordial Gravitational Radiation", this paper includes the first presentation of what has come to be known as the fingers-of-god effect. The effect is mentioned several hundred times in arXive papers, rarely with a wrong attribution, usually with none at al