2003 (IPP)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://localhost:4000/handle/11007/626
Browse
Item 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.