Bibcode
Libeskind, N. I.; van de Weygaert, Rien; Cautun, Marius; Falck, Bridget; Tempel, Elmo; Abel, Tom; Alpaslan, Mehmet; Aragón-Calvo, Miguel A.; Forero-Romero, Jaime E.; Gonzalez, Roberto; Gottlöber, Stefan; Hahn, Oliver; Hellwing, Wojciech A.; Hoffman, Yehuda; Jones, Bernard J. T.; Kitaura, F.; Knebe, Alexander; Manti, Serena; Neyrinck, Mark; Nuza, Sebastián E.; Padilla, Nelson; Platen, Erwin; Ramachandra, Nesar; Robotham, Aaron; Saar, Enn; Shandarin, Sergei; Steinmetz, Matthias; Stoica, Radu S.; Sousbie, Thierry; Yepes, Gustavo
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 473, Issue 1, p.1195-1217
Advertised on:
1
2018
Citations
241
Refereed citations
202
Description
The cosmic web is one of the most striking features of the distribution
of galaxies and dark matter on the largest scales in the Universe. It is
composed of dense regions packed full of galaxies, long filamentary
bridges, flattened sheets and vast low-density voids. The study of the
cosmic web has focused primarily on the identification of such features,
and on understanding the environmental effects on galaxy formation and
halo assembly. As such, a variety of different methods have been devised
to classify the cosmic web - depending on the data at hand, be it
numerical simulations, large sky surveys or other. In this paper, we
bring 12 of these methods together and apply them to the same data set
in order to understand how they compare. In general, these cosmic-web
classifiers have been designed with different cosmological goals in
mind, and to study different questions. Therefore, one would not a
priori expect agreement between different techniques; however, many of
these methods do converge on the identification of specific features. In
this paper, we study the agreements and disparities of the different
methods. For example, each method finds that knots inhabit higher
density regions than filaments, etc. and that voids have the lowest
densities. For a given web environment, we find a substantial overlap in
the density range assigned by each web classification scheme. We also
compare classifications on a halo-by-halo basis; for example, we find
that 9 of 12 methods classify around a third of group-mass haloes (i.e.
Mhalo ∼ 1013.5 h-1
M⊙) as being in filaments. Lastly, so that any future
cosmic-web classification scheme can be compared to the 12 methods used
here, we have made all the data used in this paper public.
Related projects
Cosmology with Large Scale Structure Probes
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) contains the statistical information about the early seeds of the structure formation in our Universe. Its natural counterpart in the local universe is the distribution of galaxies that arises as a result of gravitational growth of those primordial and small density fluctuations. The characterization of the
FRANCISCO SHU
KITAURA JOYANES