Browsing by Author "Bhavsar, Suketu P."

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Size of the longest filaments in the Universe
(2011-07-05) Bharadwaj, Somnath; Bhavsar, Suketu P.; Sheth, Jatush V.
We analyze the ﬁlamentarity in the Las Campanas redshift survey (LCRS) and determine the length scale at which ﬁlaments are statistically signiﬁcant. The largest length-scale at which ﬁlaments are statistically signiﬁcant, real objects, is between 70 to 80 h−1 Mpc, for the LCRS −3o slice. Filamentary features longer than 80 h−1 Mpc, though identiﬁed, are not statistically signiﬁcant; they arise from chance alignments. For the ﬁve other LCRS slices, ﬁlaments of lengths 50 h−1 Mpc to 70 h−1 Mpc are statistically signiﬁcant, but not beyond. These results indicate that while individual ﬁlaments up to 80 h−1 Mpc are statistically signiﬁcant, the impression of structure on larger scales is a visual eﬀect. On scales larger than 80 h−1 Mpc the ﬁlaments interconnect by statistical chance to form the the ﬁlament-void network. The reality of the 80 h−1 Mpc features in the −3o slice make them the longest coherent features in the LCRS. While ﬁlaments are a natural outcome of gravitational instability, any numerical model attempting to describe the formation of large scale structure in the universe must produce coherent structures on scales that match these observations.