Scaling of voids and fractality in the galaxy distribution

Abstract

We study here, from first principles, what properties of voids are to be expected in a fractal point distribution and how the void distribution is related to its morphology. We show this relation in various examples and apply our results to the distribution of galaxies. If the distribution of galaxies forms a fractal set, then this property results in a number of scaling laws to be fulfilled by voids. Consider a fractal set of dimension $D$ and its set of voids. If voids are ordered according to decreasing sizes (largest void has rank R=1, second largest R=2 and so on), then a relation between size $\Lambda$ and rank of the form $\Lambda (R)\propto R^{-z}$ must hold, with $z=d/D$, and where $d$ is the euclidean dimension of the space where the fractal is embedded. The physical restriction $D<d$ means that $z>1$ in a fractal set. The average size $\bar{\Lambda }$ of voids depends on the upper (${\Lambda }_u$) and the lower (${\Lambda }_l$) cut-off as $\bar{\Lambda }\propto {\Lambda }_u^{1-D/d}{\Lambda }_l^{D/d}$. Current analysis of void sizes in the galaxy distribution do not show evidence of a fractal distribution, but are insufficient to rule it out. We identify possible shortcomings of current void searching algorithms, such as changes of shape in voids at different scales or merging of voids, and propose modifications useful to test fractality in the galaxy distribution.

8 pages, 5 figures, to appear in MNRAS; improved Fig.4

References in corpus (2)

• Voids in the PSCz Survey and the Updated Zwicky Catalog
• Void Scaling and Void Profiles in CDM Models

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Scaling Laws in the Distribution of Galaxies
• Minivoids in the Local Volume
• Testing the Randomness in the Sky-Distribution of Gamma-Ray Bursts
• Halos and voids in a multifractal model of cosmic structure
• The Fractal Geometry of the Cosmic Web and its Formation
• Zipf's law for fractal voids and a new void-finder
• Voids in the SDSS Galaxy Survey
• Properties of Voids in the 2dFGRS Galaxy Survey
• Statistics and geometry of cosmic voids
• Generalized statistical models of voids and hierarchical structure in cosmology
• On de-Sitter Geometry in Cosmic Void Statistics
• Cut-out sets, fractal voids and cosmic structure
• Scaling Laws in the Cosmic Structure and Renormalization Group
• Mean-field approach to Random Apollonian Packing