IAU00662
Presentation type requested: ORAL
THE LONGEST FILAMENTS AND HOMOGENEITY IN THE LCRS
Suketu Bhavsar
University of Kentucky
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 to 80 H^{-1} Mpc, for the LCRS 3 degree slice. Filamentary features longer than 80 h^{-1}Mpc, though identified, are not statistically significant; they arise from chance alignments. For the five other LCRS slices, filaments of lengths 50 h^{-1}to 70 h^{-1} Mpc are statistically significant, but not beyond.These results indicate that while individual filaments up to 80 h^{-1} Mpc are statistically significant, the web of interconnected filaments is not. The reality of the 80h^{-1}Mpc features in the -3 degree slice make them the longest coherent features presently known in the universe. Beyond this scale the universe is statistically homogeneous. While filaments are a natural outcome of gravitational instability, any numerical model attempting to describe the formation of large scale structure in the universe must produce coherent structures on scales that match these observations.
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