The Sloan Great Wall. Morphology and galaxy content

TL;DR

This study analyzes the morphology and galaxy composition of the Sloan Great Wall, revealing diverse structures and galaxy populations, and providing insights into their formation and evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed morphological and galaxy content analysis of the Sloan Great Wall using Minkowski functionals and halo models, highlighting structural diversity.

Findings

Superclusters range from filamentary to multibranching structures.

Approximately one-third of bright red galaxies are spirals.

Galaxy group properties vary between supercluster cores and outskirts.

Abstract

We present the results of the study of the morphology and galaxy content of the Sloan Great Wall (SGW). We use the luminosity density field to determine superclusters in the SGW, and the fourth Minkowski functional V_3 and the morphological signature (the K_1-K_2 shapefinders curve) to show the different morphologies of the SGW, from a single filament to a multibranching, clumpy planar system. The richest supercluster in the SGW, SCl~126 and especially its core resemble a very rich filament, while another rich supercluster in the SGW, SCl~111, resembles a "multispider" - an assembly of high density regions connected by chains of galaxies. Using Minkowski functionals we study the substructure of individual galaxy populations determined by their color in these superclusters. We assess the statistical significance of the results with the halo model and smoothed bootstrap. We study the galaxy content and the properties of groups of galaxies in two richest superclusters of the SGW, paying special attention to bright red galaxies (BRGs) and to the first ranked galaxies in SGW groups. About 1/3 of BRGs are spirals. The scatter of colors of elliptical BRGs is smaller than that of spiral BRGs. About half of BRGs and of first ranked galaxies in groups have large peculiar velocities. Groups with elliptical BRGs as their first ranked galaxies populate superclusters more uniformly than the groups, which have a spiral BRG as its first ranked galaxy. The galaxy and group content of the core of the supercluster SCl~126 shows several differences in comparison with the outskirts of this supercluster and with the supercluster SCl~111. Our results suggest that the formation history and evolution of individual neighbour superclusters in the SGW has been different.