Detecting filamentary pattern in the cosmic web: a catalogue of filaments for the SDSS

Abstract

The main feature of the spatial large-scale galaxy distribution is its\nintricate network of galaxy filaments. This network is spanned by the galaxy\nlocations that can be interpreted as a three-dimensional point distribution.\nThe global properties of the point process can be measured by different\nstatistical methods, which, however, do not describe directly the structure\nelements. The morphology of the large scale structure, on the other hand, is an\nimportant property of the galaxy distribution. Here we apply an object point\nprocess with interactions (the Bisous model) to trace and extract the\nfilamentary network in the presently largest galaxy redshift survey, the Sloan\nDigital Sky Survey (SDSS). We search for filaments in the galaxy distribution\nthat have a radius of about 0.5 Mpc/h. We divide the detected network into\nsingle filaments and present a public catalogue of filaments. We study the\nfilament length distribution and show that the longest filaments reach the\nlength of 60 Mpc/h. The filaments contain 35-40% of the total galaxy luminosity\nand they cover roughly 5-8% of the total volume, in good agreement with N-body\nsimulations and previous observational results.\n