7 research outputs found
Crawling the Cosmic Network: Identifying and Quantifying Filamentary Structure
We present the Smoothed Hessian Major Axis Filament Finder (SHMAFF), an
algorithm that uses the eigenvectors of the Hessian matrix of the smoothed
galaxy distribution to identify individual filamentary structures. Filaments
are traced along the Hessian eigenvector corresponding to the largest
eigenvalue, and are stopped when the axis orientation changes more rapidly than
a preset threshold. In both N-body simulations and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
(SDSS) main galaxy redshift survey data, the resulting filament length
distributions are approximately exponential. In the SDSS galaxy distribution,
using smoothing lengths of 10 h^{-1} Mpc and 15 h^{-1} Mpc, we find filament
lengths per unit volume of 1.9x10^{-3} h^2 Mpc^{-2} and 7.6x10^{-4} h^2
Mpc^{-2}, respectively. The filament width distributions, which are much more
sensitive to non-linear growth, are also consistent between the real and mock
galaxy distributions using a standard cosmology. In SDSS, we find mean filament
widths of 5.5 h^{-1} Mpc and 8.4 h^{-1} Mpc on 10 h^{-1} Mpc and 15 h^{-1} Mpc
smoothing scales, with standard deviations of 1.1 h^{-1} Mpc and 1.4 h^{-1}
Mpc, respectively. Finally, the spatial distribution of filamentary structure
in simulations is very similar between z=3 and z=0 on smoothing scales as large
as 15 h^{-1} Mpc, suggesting that the outline of filamentary structure is
already in place at high redshift.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, accepted to MNRA
The density and peculiar velocity fields of nearby galaxies
We review the quantitative science that can be and has been done with
redshift and peculiar velocity surveys of galaxies in the nearby universe.
After a brief background setting the cosmological context for this work, the
first part of this review focuses on redshift surveys. The practical issues of
how redshift surveys are carried out, and how one turns a distribution of
galaxies into a smoothed density field, are discussed. Then follows a
description of major redshift surveys that have been done, and the local
cosmography out to 8,000 km/s that they have mapped. We then discuss in some
detail the various quantitative cosmological tests that can be carried out with
redshift data. The second half of this review concentrates on peculiar velocity
studies, beginning with a thorough review of existing techniques. After
discussing the various biases which plague peculiar velocity work, we survey
quantitative analyses done with peculiar velocity surveys alone, and finally
with the combination of data from both redshift and peculiar velocity surveys.
The data presented rule out the standard Cold Dark Matter model, although
several variants of Cold Dark Matter with more power on large scales fare
better. All the data are consistent with the hypothesis that the initial
density field had a Gaussian distribution, although one cannot rule out broad
classes of non-Gaussian models. Comparison of the peculiar velocity and density
fields constrains the Cosmological Density Parameter. The results here are
consistent with a flat universe with mild biasing of the galaxies relative to
dark matter, although open universe models are by no means ruled out.Comment: In press, Physics Reports. 153 pages. gzip'ed postscript of text plus
20 embedded figures. Also available via anonymous ftp at
ftp://eku.ias.edu/pub/strauss/review/physrep.p