The Size of the Longest Filaments in the Universe

Abstract

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 and 80 h À1 Mpc for the LCRS À3 slice. Filamentary features longer than 80 h À1 Mpc, although identified, are not statistically significant; they arise from chance alignments. For the five other LCRS slices, filaments of lengths 50-70 h À1 Mpc are statistically significant, but not beyond. These results indicate that while individual filaments up to 80 h À1 Mpc are statistically significant, the impression of structure on larger scales is a visual effect. On scales larger than 80 h À1 Mpc, the filaments interconnect by statistical chance to form the filament-void network. The reality of the 80 h À1 Mpc features in the À3 slice makes them the longest coherent features in the LCRS. While filaments are a natural outcome of gravitational instability, any numerical model that attempts to describe the formation of large-scale structure in the universe must produce coherent structures on scales that match these observations.

GOP Model: A Model For The Cosmos

“…The Filaments and the "Walls" are also flat. The transversal cuts present a bigger and a smaller axis and the bigger axis can be aligned with the plane of the IU [20]. All this is compatible with GOP model, and it would also be predictable, because these complex structures are stretched along the plane of bigger intensity, than the one of the GPW field which is precisely the plane where our Universe is situated.…”

“…The walls are more extensive and flatter structures than the filaments. Transversal cuts show flat sections, where can be defined a bigger and a smaller axis [20,21]. The Walls and the Filaments are interconnected and forming a mesh.…”

SDSS DR7 superclusters

“…Several methods have been proposed to study the cosmic web (Bharadwaj et al 2004;Stoica et al 2010;Aragón-Calvo et al 2010;Sousbie 2011;Sousbie et al 2011, and references therein). One approach is to determine cosmic structures (in our study -superclusters of galaxies) using the density field and to study their morphology with Minkowski functionals and shapefinders (Schmalzing & Buchert 1997;Sathyaprakash et al 1998;Basilakos 2003;Sheth et al 2003;Shandarin et al 2004;Einasto et al 2007d, and references therein).…”

Summary of cosmology workshop

“…shows the distribution of galaxies in one of the slices of the Las Campanas redshift Survey (LCRS) and highlights the filamentary structures that appear within it. S. Bharadwaj reported a novel analysis (with S. Bhavsar and J. Sheth) of the Las Campanas redshift Survey (LCRS) to determine the extent to which the filaments are genuine, statistically significant features as against the possibility of their arising from chance alignments [5]. They find that one of the LCRS slices has statistically significant filamentary features spanning scales as large as 70 to 80 h −1 Mpc, whereas filaments spanning scales larger than this are not statistically significant (see fig.…”