The maximum extent of the filaments and sheets in the cosmic web: an analysis of the SDSS DR17

Abstract

Filaments and sheets are striking visual patterns in cosmic web. The maximum extent of these large-scale structures are difficult to determine due to their structural variety and complexity. We construct a volume-limited sample of galaxies in a cubic region from the SDSS, divide it into smaller subcubes and shuffle them around. We quantify the average filamentarity and planarity in the three-dimensional galaxy distribution as a function of the density threshold and compare them with those from the shuffled realizations of the original data. The analysis is repeated for different shuffling lengths by varying the size of the subcubes. The average filamentarity and planarity in the shuffled data show a significant reduction when the shuffling scales are smaller than the maximum size of the genuine filaments and sheets. We observe a statistically significant reduction in these statistical measures even at a shuffling scale of $\sim 130$Mpc, indicating that the filaments and sheets in three dimensions can extend up to this length scale. They may extend to somewhat larger length scales that are missed by our analysis due to the limited size of the SDSS data cube. We expect to determine these length scales by applying this method to deeper and larger surveys in future.

arXiv comment11 pages, 5 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (64)

• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical Summary
• The 2.5 m Telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey: Spectra and redshifts
• Spectroscopic Target Selection in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: The Main Galaxy Sample
• The Cosmic Microwave Background Spectrum from the Full COBE/FIRAS Data Set
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Photometric Camera
• How Filaments are Woven into the Cosmic Web
• A Map of the Universe
• The Laniakea supercluster of galaxies
• Cosmic homogeneity demonstrated with luminous red galaxies
• A Test of the Cosmological Principle with Quasars
• The Multiscale Morphology Filter: Identifying and Extracting Spatial Patterns in the Galaxy Distribution
• Inter-cluster filaments in a $\Lambda$CDM Universe
• The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: the transition to large-scale cosmic homogeneity
• Evidence for anisotropy of cosmic acceleration
• Evidence for a ~300 Mpc Scale Under-density in the Local Galaxy Distribution
• The Spine of the Cosmic Web
• Detection of the velocity dipole in the radio galaxies of the NRAO VLA Sky Survey
• Shapefinders: A new shape diagnostic for large scale structure
• Dipoles in the Sky
• A structure in the early universe at z ~ 1.3 that exceeds the homogeneity scale of the R-W concordance cosmology
• The Large-Scale Smoothness of the Universe
• Skeleton as a probe of the cosmic web: the 2D case
• Morphology of the supercluster-void network in LCDM cosmology
• The scale of homogeneity of the galaxy distribution in SDSS DR6
• Scaling in the Universe
• Homogeneity and isotropy in the 2MASS Photometric Redshift catalogue
• Testing homogeneity on large scales in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release One
• Inter-cluster Filaments of Galaxies Programme: Abundance and Distribution of Filaments in the 2dFGRS Catalogue
• Measuring the Geometry and Topology of Large Scale Structure using SURFGEN: Methodology and Preliminary Results
• SDSS superclusters: morphology and galaxy content
• Is the Universe Homogeneous? (On Large Scales)
• The Size of the Longest Filaments in the Universe
• Star formation in galaxies along the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster filaments
• The 2-10 keV XRB dipole and its cosmological implications
• Large-scale Cosmic Homogeneity from a Multifractal Analysis of the PSCz Catalogue
• Direct Minkowski Functional analysis of large redshift surveys: a new high--speed code tested on the luminous red galaxy Sloan Digital Sky Survey-DR7 catalogue
• Dipolar modulation in number counts of WISE-2MASS sources
• The Scale of Cosmic Isotropy
• A Giant Arc on the Sky
• Discovery of a massive supercluster system at $z\sim 0.47$
• Saraswati: An Extremely Massive ~ 200 Megaparsec Scale Supercluster
• The Shape and Size distribution of HII Regions near the percolation transition
• Studying the morphology of HI isodensity surfaces during reionization using Shapefinders and percolation analysis
• Probing cosmological isotropy with Planck Sunyaev-Zeldovich galaxy clusters
• The angular scale of homogeneity in the Local Universe with the SDSS blue galaxies
• Direction Dependence in Supernova Data: Constraining Isotropy
• Testing homogeneity in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release Twelve with Shannon entropy
• Minkowski Functionals of SDSS-III BOSS : Hints of Possible Anisotropy in the Density Field?
• Measuring the cosmic homogeneity scale with SDSS-IV DR16 Quasars
• The Bull's-Eye Effect: Are Galaxy Walls Observationally Enhanced?
• Testing isotropy in the Universe using photometric and spectroscopic data from the SDSS
• Multiple-streaming and the Probability Distribution of Density in Redshift Space
• The size of the longest filament in the Luminous Red Galaxy distribution
• An information theory based search for homogeneity on the largest accessible scale
• Morphology of Mock SDSS Catalogues
• Probing large scale homogeneity and periodicity in the LRG distribution using Shannon entropy
• The origin of 'Great Walls'
• The Local Dimension: a method to quantify the Cosmic Web
• Unravelling the Cosmic Web: An analysis of the SDSS DR14 with the Local Dimension
• The Bull's-Eye Effect as a Probe of $\Omega$
• Testing isotropy in the Two Micron All-Sky redshift survey with information entropy
• Statistically significant length scale of filaments as a robust measure of galaxy distribution
• Testing homogeneity of the galaxy distribution in the SDSS using Renyi entropy

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Probing cosmic isotropy in the Local Universe
• Energetic particles and high-energy processes in cosmological filaments and their astronomical implications
• Impact of cosmic web on galaxy properties and their correlations: Insights from Principal Component Analysis
• Exploring the evolution of red and blue galaxies in different cosmic web environments using IllustrisTNG simulation