English

Multi-scale morphology of the galaxy distribution

Astrophysics 2008-11-26 v1

Abstract

Many statistical methods have been proposed in the last years for analyzing the spatial distribution of galaxies. Very few of them, however, can handle properly the border effects of complex observational sample volumes. In this paper, we first show how to calculate the Minkowski Functionals (MF) taking into account these border effects. Then we present a multiscale extension of the MF which gives us more information about how the galaxies are spatially distributed. A range of examples using Gaussian random fields illustrate the results. Finally we have applied the Multiscale Minkowski Functionals (MMF) to the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey data. The MMF clearly indicates an evolution of morphology with scale. We also compare the 2dF real catalog with mock catalogs and found that Lambda-CDM simulations roughly fit the data, except at the finest scale.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0610958,
  title  = {Multi-scale morphology of the galaxy distribution},
  author = {Enn Saar and Vicent J. Martinez and Jean-Luc Starck and David L. Donoho},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0610958},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

17 pages, 19 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS