Cosmic voids detection without density measurements

Abstract

Cosmic voids are effective cosmological probes to discriminate among competing world models. Their identification is generally based on density or geometry criteria that, because of their very nature, are prone to shot noise. We propose two void finders that are based on dynamical criterion to select voids in Lagrangian coordinates and minimise the impact of sparse sampling. The first approach exploits the Zel'dovich approximation to trace back in time the orbits of galaxies located in voids and their surroundings, the second uses the observed galaxy-galaxy correlation function to relax the objects' spatial distribution to homogeneity and isotropy. In both cases voids are defined as regions of the negative velocity divergence, that can be regarded as sinks of the back-in-time streamlines of the mass tracers. To assess the performance of our methods we used a dark matter halo mock catalogue CoDECS, and compared the results with those obtained with the ZOBOV void finder. We find that the void divergence profiles are less scattered than the density ones and, therefore, their stacking constitutes a more accurate cosmological probe. The significance of the divergence signal in the central part of voids obtained from both our finders is 60% higher than for overdensity profiles in the ZOBOV case. The ellipticity of the stacked void measured in the divergence field is closer to unity, as expected, than what is found when using halo positions. Therefore our void finders are complementary to the existing methods, that should contribute to improve the accuracy of void-based cosmological tests.

12 pages, 18 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (67)

• The Seventh Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Populating a cluster of galaxies - I. Results at z=0
• Coupled Quintessence
• The Tenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the SDSS-III Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment
• Euclid Definition Study Report
• Cosmology and fundamental physics with the Euclid satellite
• Cosmicflows-2: The Data
• Properties of Dark Matter Haloes in Clusters, Filaments, Sheets and Voids
• A hierarchy of voids: Much ado about nothing
• ZOBOV: a parameter-free void-finding algorithm
• The Void Phenomenon
• A Cosmic Watershed: the WVF Void Detection Technique
• Precision cosmography with stacked voids
• Hydrodynamical N-body simulations of coupled dark energy cosmologies
• The Aspen--Amsterdam Void Finder Comparison Project
• The structure of voids
• Testing Gravity using Cosmic Voids
• Voids in Modified Gravity: Excursion Set Predictions
• The darkness that shaped the void: dark energy and cosmic voids
• Voids in a $\Lambda$CDM Universe
• Reconstruction of the early Universe as a convex optimization problem
• Precision cosmology with voids: definition, methods, dynamics
• A first application of the Alcock-Paczynski test to stacked cosmic voids
• Wide-Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST) Final Report
• The Hierarchical Structure and Dynamics of Voids
• First measurement of gravitational lensing by cosmic voids in SDSS
• The VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS). Luminosity and stellar mass dependence of galaxy clustering at 0.5<z<1.1
• A measurement of the Alcock-Paczynski effect using cosmic voids in the SDSS
• 3D Velocity and Density Reconstructions of the Local Universe with Cosmicflows-1
• Lensing Measurements of the Mass Distribution in SDSS Voids
• Voids as a Precision Probe of Dark Energy
• Gamma-ray induced cascades and magnetic fields in intergalactic medium
• The CoDECS project: a publicly available suite of cosmological N-body simulations for interacting dark energy models
• The Weight of Emptiness: The Gravitational Lensing Signal of Stacked Voids
• Shapes and Sizes of Voids in the LCDM Universe: Excursion Set Approach
• Statistics of Voids in the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey
• Relaxation of Blazar Induced Pair Beams in Cosmic Voids
• The Size and Shape of Local Voids
• The orientation of galaxy dark matter haloes around cosmic voids
• Minivoids in the Local Volume
• Behaviour of Lagrangian Approximations in Spherical Voids
• Gravitational lensing shear by an exotic lens object with negative convergence or negative mass
• On the least action principle in cosmology
• Reconstruction of cosmological density and velocity fields in the Lagrangian Zel'dovich Approximation
• BigBOSS: The Ground-Based Stage IV Dark Energy Experiment
• The Voronoi Tessellation cluster finder in 2+1 dimensions
• KK246, a dwarf galaxy with extended H I disk in the Local Void
• Topology and Dark Energy: Testing Gravity in Voids
• On the magnetic fields in voids
• Self-similarity and universality of void density profiles in simulation and SDSS data
• The Ellipticity and Orientation of Clusters of Galaxies from N-Body Experiments
• The dark matter of galaxy voids
• The structure of cosmic voids in a LCDM Universe
• Dark matter voids in the SDSS galaxy survey
• Excursion Sets and Non-Gaussian Void Statistics
• Cosmology with clustering anisotropies: disentangling dynamic and geometric distortions in galaxy redshift surveys
• The Shapes of Galaxy Clusters
• Catalog of Nearby Isolated Galaxies in the Volume z<0.01
• Holes in the static Einstein universe and the model of the cosmological voids
• Cosmological parameter constraints from CMB lensing with cosmic voids
• Low-Density Structures in the Local Universe. II. Nearby Cosmic Voids
• Nebular metallicities in two isolated Local Void dwarf galaxies
• On de-Sitter Geometry in Cosmic Void Statistics
• Distinguishing f(R) gravity with cosmic voids
• CLUSTERING AND LARGE SCALE STRUCTURE WITH THE SDSS
• Voids as Alternatives to Dark Energy and the Propagation of Gamma Rays through the Universe
• Extreme TeV Blazars and Lower Limits on Intergalactic Magnetic Fields

Cited by in corpus (23)

• The CosmoVerse White Paper: Addressing observational tensions in cosmology with systematics and fundamental physics
• Cosmic Voids and Void Lensing in the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification Data
• On the linearity of tracer bias around voids
• Cosmic voids in coupled dark energy cosmologies: the impact of halo bias
• The nature of voids: I. Watershed void finders and their connection with theoretical models
• Bayesian analysis of the dynamic cosmic web in the SDSS galaxy survey
• Cosmological exploitation of the size function of cosmic voids identified in the distribution of biased tracers
• Cosmic voids in modified gravity scenarios
• Redshift-space effects in voids and their impact on cosmological tests. Part I: the void size function
• Cosmological exploitation of cosmic void statistics - New numerical tools in the CosmoBolognaLib to extract cosmological constraints from the void size function
• Cosmic voids uncovered -- first-order statistics of depressions in the biased density field
• Dark Matter-Dark Energy Interaction and the Shape of Cosmic Voids
• Guess the cheese flavour by the size of its holes: A cosmological test using the abundance of Popcorn voids
• Constraining Dark Energy With Stacked Concave Lenses
• The Voronoi tessellation method in astronomy
• Machine-learning computation of distance modulus for local galaxies
• Machine learning technique for morphological classification of galaxies from the SDSS. III. Image-based inference of detailed features
• The four cosmic tidal web elements from the $\beta$-skeleton
• Constraining cosmological parameters using void statistics from the SDSS survey
• Bayesian large-scale structure inference and cosmic web analysis
• The galaxy bias profile of cosmic voids
• AVISM: Algorithm for Void Identification in coSMology
• Multivariate analysis of cosmic void characteristics