1999ApJ...522L..85F

It has been suggested that the mass-to-light (M/L) ratio of gravitationally clustering objects is scale-independent on scales beyond galaxy clusters and may also be independent of the mass of the objects. In this Letter, we show that the scale behavior of the M/L ratio is closely related to the scaling of cosmic structures that are larger than clusters. The scale dependence of the M/L ratio can be determined by comparing the observed scaling of the richness function (RF) of multiscale-identified objects with the model-predicted scaling of the mass function (MF) of large-scale structures. Using the multiscale-identified clusters from the IRAS 1.2 Jy galaxy survey, we have made comparisons of the observed RF scaling of IRAS r_cl clusters with the MF scalings given by simulations of three popular models: SCDM, LCDM, and OCDM. We find that the M/L ratio is basically scale-independent from the Abell radius up to about 24 h^–1 Mpc, while it seems to show a slight, but systematical, increase over this scale range. This result is weakly dependent on the cosmological parameters.