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 3D 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 $\sim 130 \, {{\, \rm Mpc}}$, 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.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Dec 20, 2022
- Source ID
- 10.1093/mnras/stac3722
Entities
People
- Biswajit Pandey
- Prakash Sarkar
- Suman Sarkar
Organizations
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- American Museum of Natural History
- Case Western Reserve University
- Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Drexel University
- Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research
- Institute for Advanced Study
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- National Science Foundation
- New Mexico State University
- United States Department of Energy
- United States Naval Observatory
- University of Basel
- University of Pittsburgh
- University of Portsmouth
- University of Washington
- Visva-Bharati University