Mastering the effects of peculiar velocities in cosmic voids

Abstract

How do peculiar velocities affect observed voids? To answer this question we use the VIDE toolkit to identify voids in mock galaxy populations embedded within an N-body simulation both with and without peculiar velocities included. We compare the resulting void populations to assess the impact on void properties. We find that void abundances and spherically-averaged radial density profiles are mildly affected by peculiar velocities. However, peculiar velocities can distort by up to 10% the shapes for a particular subset of voids depending on the void size and density contrast, which can lead to increased variance in Alcock-Paczyński test. We offer guidelines for performing optimal cuts on the void catalogue to reduce this variance by removing the most severely affected voids while preserving the unaffected ones. In addition, since this shape distortion is largely limited to the line of sight, we show that the void radii are only affected at the $\sim$ 10% level and the macrocenter positions at the $\sim$ 20% (even before performing cuts), meaning that cosmological probes based on the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe and gravitational lensing are not severely impacted by peculiar velocities.

arXiv comment12 pages, 12 figures and 2 tables, prepared for submission to MNRAS. Comments welcome ( [email protected] )

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Constraints on Cosmology and Gravity from the Dynamics of Voids
• Observational Challenges for the Standard FLRW Model
• The Void Size Function in Dynamical Dark Energy Cosmologies
• DEMNUni: disentangling dark energy from massive neutrinos with the void size function
• Exploring the cosmological synergy between galaxy cluster and cosmic void number counts
• The universal multiplicity function: counting halos and voids
• The role of the elaphrocentre in void galaxy formation