How filaments of galaxies are woven into the cosmic web

By J. Richard Bond, Lev Kofman, D. Pogosyan. 1995

LARGE-SCALE structure in the distribution of galaxies is thought to have evolved through gravitational instabilities from small density fluctuations in the (largely homogeneous) early Universe. This structure of galaxies consists of rich and poor clusters, connected by filaments and sheets, with regions largely devoid of galaxies (voids) in between1. Numerical simulations of the growth of initial density fluctuations through a nonlinear regime, motivated by the likely physics of the early Universe, also show a network of filaments and voids2,3,18, but the origin of this picture of filaments as the dominant structure was not well understood. Here we show that the 'web' of filaments that defines the final state in these simulations is present in the initial density fluctuations; the pattern of the web is defined largely by the rare density peaks in the initial fluctuations, with the subsequent nonlinear evolution of the structure bringing the filamentary network into sharper relief. Applying these results to the observed galaxy distribution, we suggest that 'superclusters' are filamentary cluster–cluster bridges, and we predict that the most pronounced filaments will be found between clusters of galaxies that are aligned with each other and close together.

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Citations in the corpus

Learning to predict the cosmological structure formation (2018, background): “In order to produce the cosmic web (12) in large volume, we select gravity, the most important component of the theory, to simulate at large scales.”
The large-scale structure of the Universe (2006, background): “Galaxies, groups and clusters are linked together in a pattern of sheets and filaments that is commonly known as the ‘cosmic web&rsquo”
Global hierarchical collapse in molecular clouds. Towards a comprehensive scenario (2019, background): “…bears a strong resemblance to the formation of structure in the early Universe, by means of a cosmic web of filaments in which galaxies form (e.g., Bond et al. 1996; Cantalupo et al. 2014), and within which, in turn, the first clusters form again through filamentary accretion (e.g.,…”
Initial Conditions For Large Cosmological Simulations (2008, methodology): “Using constrained field formalism Bond et al. (1996) have demonstrated that the observed filamentary Cosmic Web of matter distribution in the Universe can be understood as dynamical enhancement of the geometrical properties of intial density field.”