Detection of cosmic filaments using the Candy model

¹ INRA – Biometrie, Domaine St. Paul, site Agroparc, 84914 Avignon Cedex 9, France e-mail: Radu.Stoica@avignon.inra.fr
² Departament de Matemàtiques, Universitat Jaume I, Campus Riu Sec, 12071 Castelló, Spain e-mail: mateu@mat.uji.es
³ Observatori Astronòmic de la Universitat de València, Apartat de correus 22085, 46071 València, Spain e-mail: martinez@uv.es
⁴ Tartu Observatoorium, Tõravere 61602, Estonia e-mail: saar@aai.ee

Received: 22 November 2004
Accepted: 8 December 2004

Abstract

We propose to apply a marked point process to automatically delineate filaments of the large-scale structure in redshift catalogues. We illustrate the feasibility of the idea on an example of simulated catalogues, describe the procedure, and characterize the results. We find the distribution of the length of the filaments, and suggest how to use this approach to obtain other statistical characteristics of filamentary networks.