Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) : fine filaments of galaxies detected within voids
Date
01/05/2014Author
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Abstract
Based on data from the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey, we report on the discovery of structures that we refer to as ‘tendrils’ of galaxies: coherent, thin chains of galaxies that are rooted in filaments and terminate in neighbouring filaments or voids. On average, tendrils contain six galaxies and span 10 h−1 Mpc. We use the so-called line correlation function to prove that tendrils represent real structures rather than accidental alignments. We show that voids found in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, 7th data release survey that overlap with GAMA regions contain a large number of galaxies, primarily belonging to tendrils. This implies that void sizes are strongly dependent on the number density and sensitivity limits of a survey. We caution that galaxies in low-density regions, which may be defined as ‘void galaxies,’ will have local galaxy number densities that depend on such observational limits and are likely higher than those can be directly measured.
Citation
Alpaslan , M , Robotham , A S G , Obreschkow , D , Penny , S , Driver , S , Norberg , P , Brough , S , Brown , M , Cluver , M , Holwerda , B , Hopkins , A M , Kampen , E V , Kelvin , L S , Lara-Lopez , M A , Liske , J , Loveday , J , Mahajan , S & Pimbblet , K 2014 , ' Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) : fine filaments of galaxies detected within voids ' , Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters , vol. 440 , no. 1 , pp. L106-L110 . https://doi.org/10.1093/mnrasl/slu019
Publication
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1745-3925Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2014, the Author(s). This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the final published version of the work, which was originally published at https://doi.org/10.1093/mnrasl/slu019
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