Morphology of Clusters and Superclusters in N-body simulations of Cosmological Gravitational Clustering

Details Morphology of Clusters and Superclusters in N-body simulations of Cosmological Gravitational Clustering Morphology of Clusters and Superclusters in N-body simulations of Cosmological Gravitational Clustering

1998-05-21

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9805285v1

Astrophys.J. 508 (1998) 551-569

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Latex, 25 pages with aaspp4.sty including 26 figures formatted with graphicx

Scientific paper

10.1086/306447

We analyse shapes of overdense regions (clusters and superclusters) in controlled N-body simulations of gravitational clustering with power law initial spectra P(k) \propto k^n, n = -3, -2, -1, 0. At values of the density just above the percolation transition the number of distinct (isolated) clusters peaks and we use this `natural threshold' to study the shapes and multiplicity function of clusters and superclusters. We find that the extent of both filamentarity and pancakeness increases as the simulation evolves, the former being appreciably larger than the latter at virtually all epochs and for all spectra considered by us. Our results also show that high density regions within very massive clusters/superclusters are likely to be noticeably filamentary or pancake/ribbon-like when compared to the less dense regions within these objects. We make a detailed study of two, moment-based `shape statistics' proposed, respectively, by Babul & Starkman (BS) and Luo & Vishniac (LV) and find that both LV and BS have certain built-in limitations: LV is biased towards oblate structures and tends to overemphasise this property; neither BS nor LV correctly describe the shape of strongly curved or topologically nontrivial objects. For instance, a thin filamentary torus and a ribbon are both described by BS and LV as being pancakes ! By contrast Shapefinders, a new shape diagnostic not constructed from density moments but from Minskowski functionals, does not suffer from these limitations and appears to faithfully reproduce the shapes of both simple and topologically complex objects.

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