Extragalactic filament detection with a layer smoothing method

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new layer smoothing method for detecting extragalactic filaments in galaxy distribution data, demonstrating its application to SDSS data and proposing an effective approach for real filament detection.

Contribution

A novel layer smoothing technique for filament detection in observational galaxy data, extending beyond simulation-based methods.

Findings

Effective detection of filaments in SDSS data.

Three different layer smoothing methods tested.

Identification of optimal radial layers for filament detection.

Abstract

Filaments are clearly visible in galaxy distributions, but they are hardly detected by computer algorithms. Most methods of filament detection can be used only with numerical simulations of a large-scale structure. New simple and effective methods for the real filament detection should be developed. The method of a smoothed galaxy density field was applied in this work to SDSS data of galaxy positions. Five concentric radial layers of 100 Mpc are appropriate for filaments detection. Two methods were tested for the first layer and one more method is proposed.