  We reconsider the collapse of cosmic structures in an Einstein-de Sitter
Universe, using the self similar initial conditions of Fillmore & Goldreich
(1984). We first derive a new approximation to describe the dark matter
dynamics in spherical geometry, that we refer to the "fluid approach". This
method enables us to recover the self-similarity solutions of Fillmore &
Goldreich for dark matter. We derive also new self-similarity solutions for the
gas. We thus compare directly gas and dark matter dynamics, focusing on the
differences due to their different dimensionalities in velocity space. This
work may have interesting consequences for gas and dark matter distributions in
large galaxy clusters, allowing to explain why the total mass profile is always
steeper than the X-ray gas profile. We discuss also the shape of the dark
matter density profile found in N-body simulations in terms of a change of
dimensionality in the dark matter velocity space. The stable clustering
hypothesis has been finally considered in the light of this analytical
approach.
