scholarly journals Characterizing the large scale inhomogeneity of the galaxy distribution

Author(s):  
Francesco Sylos Labini ◽  
Jean-Michel Alimi ◽  
André Fuözfa
2020 ◽  
Vol 497 (4) ◽  
pp. 4077-4090 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suman Sarkar ◽  
Biswajit Pandey

ABSTRACT A non-zero mutual information between morphology of a galaxy and its large-scale environment is known to exist in Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) upto a few tens of Mpc. It is important to test the statistical significance of these mutual information if any. We propose three different methods to test the statistical significance of these non-zero mutual information and apply them to SDSS and Millennium run simulation. We randomize the morphological information of SDSS galaxies without affecting their spatial distribution and compare the mutual information in the original and randomized data sets. We also divide the galaxy distribution into smaller subcubes and randomly shuffle them many times keeping the morphological information of galaxies intact. We compare the mutual information in the original SDSS data and its shuffled realizations for different shuffling lengths. Using a t-test, we find that a small but statistically significant (at $99.9{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ confidence level) mutual information between morphology and environment exists upto the entire length-scale probed. We also conduct another experiment using mock data sets from a semi-analytic galaxy catalogue where we assign morphology to galaxies in a controlled manner based on the density at their locations. The experiment clearly demonstrates that mutual information can effectively capture the physical correlations between morphology and environment. Our analysis suggests that physical association between morphology and environment may extend to much larger length-scales than currently believed, and the information theoretic framework presented here can serve as a sensitive and useful probe of the assembly bias and large-scale environmental dependence of galaxy properties.


1999 ◽  
Vol 183 ◽  
pp. 256-256
Author(s):  
U. Lindner ◽  
K.J. Fricke ◽  
J. Einasto ◽  
M. Einasto

We present an investigation of the galaxy distribution in the huge underdense region between the Hercules, Coma and Local Superclusters, the so-called Northern Local Void (NLV), using void statistics (for details refer to Lindner et al. this Volume). Reshift data for galaxies and poor clusters of galaxies are available in low and high density regions as well. Samples of galaxies with different morphological type and various luminosity limits have been studied separately and void catalogues have been compiled from three different luminosity limited galaxy samples for the first time. Voids have been found using the empty sphere method which has the potential to detect and describe subtle structures in the galaxy distribution. Our approach is complementary to most other methods usually used in Large–Scale Structure studies.


1988 ◽  
Vol 130 ◽  
pp. 510-511
Author(s):  
Manolis Plionis

The Shane & Wirtanen (SW) galaxy catalog, as reduced by Seldner et al (SSGP), is used to calculate the dipole vector of the galaxy distribution. The catalogue covers 86% of the North and 53% of the South Galactic cap (totally 8.8 steradians) and contains about 810,000 galaxies binned in 10′ × 10′ cells with magnitude limit mB ∼ 18.8. Dipoles have been found in the IRAS and in an optical catalogue based on the ESO, UGC and MCG catalogues, with average depths of ∼ 100 h−1 and ∼ 50 h−1 Mpc respectively. The direction of these dipoles is consistent with that of the microwave background dipole which means that the structures responsible for the dipole are present within the limits of the shallower catalogue and dominate the large-scale morpology of the galaxy distribution in both catalogues. It can therefore be expected that these structures will be ‘washed out’ by more distant structures dominating the deeper SW catalogue. The characteristic depth of the SW catalogue is 360 h−1 and the median depth of a cluster sample, identified from the SW catalogue by an objective proccedure, is ∼ 180 h−1 Mpc. Even if a dipole is found there is no apparent reason for it to point towards the MWB dipole direction since other galaxy fluctuations, comparable in size with those responsible for the MWB dipole, should be present in the SW catalogue if the Cosmological Principle is relevant on scales traced by the catalogue.


2020 ◽  
Vol 642 ◽  
pp. A19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Malavasi ◽  
Nabila Aghanim ◽  
Marian Douspis ◽  
Hideki Tanimura ◽  
Victor Bonjean

Detecting the large-scale structure of the Universe based on the galaxy distribution and characterising its components is of fundamental importance in astrophysics but is also a difficult task to achieve. Wide-area spectroscopic redshift surveys are required to accurately measure galaxy positions in space that also need to cover large areas of the sky. It is also difficult to create algorithms that can extract cosmic web structures (e.g. filaments). Moreover, these detections will be affected by systematic uncertainties that stem from the characteristics of the survey used (e.g. its completeness and coverage) and from the unique properties of the specific method adopted to detect the cosmic web (i.e. the assumptions it relies on and the free parameters it may employ). For these reasons, the creation of new catalogues of cosmic web features on wide sky areas is important, as this allows users to have at their disposal a well-understood sample of structures whose systematic uncertainties have been thoroughly investigated. In this paper we present the filament catalogues created using the discrete persistent structure extractor tool in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and we fully characterise them in terms of their dependence on the choice of parameters pertaining to the algorithm, and with respect to several systematic issues that may arise in the skeleton as a result of the properties of the galaxy distribution (such as Finger-of-God redshift distortions and defects of the density field that are due to the boundaries of the survey).


1994 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 669-686
Author(s):  
V. de Lapparent

The nearby galaxy distribution suggests a remarkable structure in which large voids are delineated by dense walls of galaxies in a cell-like pattern. The nearby voids range in diameter from ∼ 10 to ∼ 50h− 1 Mpc. Deeper surveys appear to be consistent with the nearby distribution and show no evidence of voids larger than ∼ 100h −1 ∗ Mpc. We might thus have reached the scale where the universe becomes homogeneous. The size of the largest inhomogeneities in the galaxy distribution is an important issue because it can put tight constraints on the theoretical models when confronted by the high degree of isotropy of the microwave background radiation. Comparison of the various existing redshift surveys emphasizes the need for systematic redshift surveys over significant areas of the sky out to intermediate and large distances. Although deep pencil-beam surveys are best suited for probing a large number of voids and walls, understanding the nature of the intercepted peaks and valleys in terms of large-scale structure requires that the angular coverage of the surveys be larger than the galaxy auto-correlation length. If this condition is not satisfied, the size of the voids and the density contrast of the walls can be overestimated.


2019 ◽  
Vol 99 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yue Nan ◽  
Kazuhiro Yamamoto ◽  
Hajime Aoki ◽  
Satoshi Iso ◽  
Daisuke Yamauchi

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. S1139-S1144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zewu Yan ◽  
Li Ju ◽  
François Eon ◽  
Slawomir Gras ◽  
Chunnong Zhao ◽  
...  

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