Related papers: Topology of the Galaxy Distribution
We summarize the status of a ``targeted'' redshift survey aimed at establishing the properties of galaxies and their large scale distribution in the redshift range 2.5 < z < 3.5. At the time of this writing, we have obtained spectra of more…
Over the past three decades the established view of a nearly homogeneuous, featureless Universe on scales larger than a few Megaparsec has been completely overhauled. In particular through the advent of ever larger galaxy redshift surveys…
What is the shape of the Universe? Is it curved or flat, finite or infinite ? Is space "wrapped around" to create ghost images of faraway cosmic sources? We review how tessellations allow to build multiply-connected 3D Riemannian spaces…
The formalism of Wiener filtering is applied to reconstruct, in terms of spherical harmonics, the projected $4\pi$ galaxy distribution of a mock IRAS 1.2 Jy catalog with a `Zone of Avoidance' $|b| = 15^\circ$. The Singular Value…
This project uses the 2MASS all-sky image database to study the structure of galaxies over a range of luminosities, sizes and morphological types. This first paper in this series will outline the techniques, reliability and data products to…
What the future holds for the stellar populations of the Milky Way Galaxy may (optimistically) be predicted by study of their past histories, as written in the chemical abundance distributions, angular momentum distributions, velocity…
The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey is now well underway, having already measured the redshifts to ~5600 galaxies in its first season of observations. Here I briefly review the survey itself, before discussing in more detail some of the…
We propose that structural, kinematical, and chemical properties of the Galactic globular clusters (GCs) can contain fossil information of the cosmic reionization history. We first summarize possible observational evidences for the…
Methods for the statistical characterization of the large-scale structure in the Universe will be the main topic of the present text. The focus is on geometrical methods, mainly Minkowski functionals and the J-function. Their relations to…
We propose and investigate a new algorithm for quantifying the topological properties of cosmological density fluctuations. We first motivate this algorithm by drawing a formal distinction between two definitions of relevant topological…
We study statistical properties of galaxy structures in several samples extracted from the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey. In particular, we measured conditional fluctuations by means of the scale-length method and determined their probability…
We investigate analytically a large-scale coherence in the orientation of galaxies embedded in two-dimensional sheet-like structures in the frame of the tidal torque theory. Assuming that the galaxy spin and the surrounding matter fields…
The epoch of galaxy assembly from 2<=z<=4 marks a critical stage during the evolution of today's galaxy population. During this period the star-formation activity in the Universe was at its peak level, and the structural patterns observed…
We investigate the resolved star formation properties of a sample of 45 massive galaxies (M_*>10^11M_solar) within a redshift range of 1.5 < z < 3 detected in the GOODS NICMOS Survey (Conselice et al. 2011), a HST H-band imaging program. We…
In this letter we present an idea which reconciles a homogeneous and isotropic Friedmann universe with a fractal distribution of galaxies. We use two observational facts: The flat rotation curves of galaxies and the (still debated) fractal…
We explore the motivation behind large stellar surveys in Galactic astronomy, in particular, surveys that measure the photometric, phase space and abundance properties of thousands or millions of stars. These observations are essential to…
Galaxies are arranged in interconnected walls and filaments forming a cosmic web encompassing huge, nearly empty, regions between the structures. Many statistical methods have been proposed in the past in order to describe the galaxy…
The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey has now been completed and has mapped the three-dimensional distribution, and hence clustering, of galaxies in exquisite detail over an unprecedentedly large ($\sim 10^{8} h^{-3}$ Mpc$^{3}$) volume of the…
We study the topology of cosmic large-scale structure through the genus statistics, using galaxy catalogues generated from the Millennium Simulation and observational data from the latest Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release (SDSS DR7). We…
The large scale structure of the universe is reconstructed by means of the Wiener filter and constrained realizations of Gaussian fields. The density field constructed from optically selected galaxies (Hudson \cite{Hudson}) has been sampled…