The Aspen-Amsterdam void finder comparison project

By J. Colberg, Frazer R. Pearce, C. Foster, Erwin Platen, R. Brunino, Mark Neyrinck, S. Basilakos, A. Fairall, H. Feldman, Stefan Gottloeber and 23 more. 2008

183 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 thirteen different void finders constructed using particles, haloes, and semi– analytical model galaxies extracted from a subvolume of the Millennium simulation. The 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 percent 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 mB = 20 is found to be smaller than about 0.8 by all our void finding algorithms.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a89acb03cc5fd536cbaa05664881a8693be0954f

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Citations in the corpus

The persistent cosmic web and its filamentary structure I: Theory and implementation (2010, background): “…kind of problem by Platen et al. (2007) as a means of identifying voids in large-scale structures (see also Platen, van de Weygaert & Jones 2008; Colberg et al. 2008; Aragón-Calvo et al. 2010a); it was later extended to the identification of walls and filaments through a pseudo-Morse complex…”
Three-Dimensional Dust Radiative Transfer ∗ (2013, background): “…in many different computational astrophysics areas, including molecular line transfer (van Zadelhoff et al. 2002), halo and void finder algorithms (Colberg et al. 2008, Knebe et al. 2011), astrophysical hydrodynamics (Agertz et al. 2007), cosmological hydrodynamical simulations (Frenk et al.…”
Tracing the dark matter sheet in phase space (2011, background): “Configuration space density estimators also play a particularly important role when studying the topology and character of the cosmic web (e.g Schaap & van de Weygaert 2000; Pelupessy et al. 2003; Aragón-Calvo et al. 2007; Colberg et al. 2008; Neyrinck 2008).”
Testing gravity using cosmic voids (2014, background): “…the technical details of how voids are defined: 1) given the same simulation, different void-finding algorithms do not usually find the same voids (Colberg et al. 2008); 2) voids definedusing tracers (galaxies or haloes) are expected to be different f om voids defined using the dark matter field.”
A Dynamical Classification of the Cosmic Web (2008, background): “A thorough review and comparison of different algorithms of void finders has been recently presented in Colberg et al. (2008).”
Primordial non-Gaussianity from the large-scale structure (2010, methodology): “[138] J.”
Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, background): “, [329] and references therein), the challenge here is to match the theoretical predictions to a particular void-identification criterion based on a specific galaxy sample.”
A kinematic classification of the cosmic web (2012, background): “The thorough review of Colberg et al. (2008) of void finders provides some perspective to the general issue of web classifiers.”
Tracing the cosmic web (2017, background): “In the spirit of previous structure finder comparison projects (Colberg et al. 2008; Knebe et al. 2011, etc.), we present a comparison of cosmic web identification codes and philosophies.”