Bibcode
Patiri, Santiago G.; Betancort-Rijo, J. E.; Prada, Francisco; Klypin, Anatoly; Gottlöber, Stefan
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 369, Issue 1, pp. 335-348.
Advertised on:
6
2006
Citations
82
Refereed citations
73
Description
We present a statistical analysis of voids in the two-degree Field
Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS). In order to detect the voids, we have
developed two robust algorithms. We define voids as non-overlapping
maximal spheres empty of haloes or galaxies with mass or luminosity
above a given value. We search for voids in cosmological N-Body
simulations to test the performance of our void finders. We obtain and
analyse the void statistics for several volume-limited samples for the
North Galactic Pole (NGP) and the South Galactic Pole (SGP) constructed
from the 2dFGRS full data release. We find that the results obtained
from the NGP and the SGP are statistically compatible. From the results
of several statistical tests we conclude that voids are essentially
uncorrelated, with at most a mild anticorrelation and that at the 99.5
per cent confidence level there is a dependence of the void number
density on redshift. We develop a technique to correct the distortion
caused by the fact that we use the redshift as the radial coordinate. We
calibrate this technique with mock catalogues and find that the
correction might be of some relevance to carry out accurate inferences
from void statistics. We study the statistics of the galaxies inside
nine nearby voids. We find that galaxies in voids are not randomly
distributed: they form structures like filaments. We also obtain the
galaxy number density profile in voids. This profile follow a similar
but steeper trend to that followed by haloes in voids.