Our results serve to identify a limitation of the the well-known Press-Schechter approximation for the time-dependent mass function of cosmological structure formation. In the latter approximation, the mass function determined from the predicted collapse of positive density fluctuations is multiplied by an ad hoc correction factor of 2 based upon an assumption that every positive density fluctuation which is fated to collapse will simultaneously accrete an equal share of additional matter from nearby regions of compensating negative density fluctuation. The model presented here explicitly determines the actual value of the factor by which any positive density fluctuation which ever collapses will asymptotically increase its mass by accreting from a compensating underdensity which surrounds it. We show that, while the famous factor of 2 adopted by the Press-Schechter approximation is correct for an Einstein-de~Sitter universe, it is not correct when the "freeze-out" of fluctuation growth inherent in the more general class of background universes described above occurs. When "freeze-out" occurs, the correction factor reduces to unity and the standard Press-Schechter approximation must overestimate the collapsed fraction.
To illustrate this effect, we apply our model to currently viable versions of the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) model for structure formation, with primordial density fluctuations in accordance with data on cosmic microwave background anisotropy from the COBE satellite DMR experiment. For H_0=70km/s/Mpc and matter-density parameter Omega_0=0.3, the open, matter-dominated CDM model and the flat CDM model with nonzero cosmological constant yield asymptotic collapsed fractions on the galaxy cluster mass-scale of 10^15 M_sun and above of 0.0361 and 0.0562, respectively, only 55% of the values determined by the Press-Schechter approximation. These results have implications for the use of the latter approximation to compare the observed space density of X-ray clusters today with that predicted by cosmological models.
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