The Aspen–Amsterdam void finder comparison project |
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| Authors: | Jörg M Colberg Frazer Pearce Caroline Foster Erwin Platen Riccardo Brunino Mark Neyrinck Spyros Basilakos Anthony Fairall Hume Feldman Stefan Gottlöber Oliver Hahn Fiona Hoyle Volker Müller Lorne Nelson Manolis Plionis Cristiano Porciani Sergei Shandarin Michael S Vogeley Rien van de Weygaert |
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| Institution: | Carnegie–Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA;Astronomy Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA;School of Physics &Astronomy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2LE;Department of Physics, Bishop's University, 2600 College Street, Sherbrooke, QC J1M 0C8, Canada;Centre for Astrophysics &Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC 3122, Australia;Kapteyn Institute, University of Groningen, PO Box 800, 9700 AV Groningen, the Netherlands;Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA;Research Centre for Astronomy &Applied Mathematics, Academy of Athens, Soranou Efessiou 4, 11-527 Athens, Greece;Department of Astronomy, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch 7700, South Africa;Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA;Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam, An der Sternwarte 16, 14482 Potsdam, Germany;ETH Zürich, 8093 Zürich, Switzerland;Department of Physics and Astronomy, Widener University, One University Place, Chester, PA 19013, USA;Institute of Astronomy &Astrophysics, National Observatory of Athens, I. Metaxa &B. Pavlou, P. Penteli 152 36, Athens, Greece;Instituto Nacional de Astrofisica, Optica y Electronica (INAOE) Apartado Postal 51 y 216, 72000 Puebla, Pue., Mexico;Department of Physics, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA |
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| Abstract: | Despite a history that dates back at least a quarter of a century, studies of voids in the large-scale structure of the Universe are bedevilled by a major problem: there exist a large number of quite different void-finding algorithms, a fact that has so far got in the way of groups comparing their results without worrying about whether such a comparison in fact makes sense. Because of the recent increased interest in voids, both in very large galaxy surveys and in detailed simulations of cosmic structure formation, this situation is very unfortunate. We here present the first systematic comparison study of 13 different void finders constructed using particles, haloes, and semi-analytical model galaxies extracted from a subvolume of the Millennium simulation. This study includes many groups that have studied voids over the past decade. We show their results and discuss their differences and agreements. As it turns out, the basic results of the various methods agree very well with each other in that they all locate a major void near the centre of our volume. Voids have very underdense centres, reaching below 10 per cent of the mean cosmic density. In addition, those void finders that allow for void galaxies show that those galaxies follow similar trends. For example, the overdensity of void galaxies brighter than m B =?20 is found to be smaller than about ?0.8 by all our void finding algorithms. |
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| Keywords: | methods: N-body simulations cosmology: theory dark matter large-scale structure of Universe |
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