Dr. Suketu
Bhavsar
Title: The Filament-Void
Network and Scale of Homogeneity in the Universe
We analyze the filamentarity in the Las Campanas
redshift survey (LCRS) and determine the length scale
at which filaments are statistically significant. The largest length-scale at
which filaments are statistically significant, real objects, is between 70 to
80 h^{-1}Mpc, for the LCRS 3 degree slice.
Filamentary features longer than 80^{-1}Mpc, though identified, are not statistically significant;
they arise from chance alignments. For the five other LCRS slices, filaments of
lengths 50 h^{-1} to 70^{-1}Mpc
are statistically significant, but not beyond. These results indicate that
while individual filaments up to 80 h^{-1}Mpc are statistically significant, the web of
interconnected filaments is not. The reality of the 80 h^{-1}Mpc features in the -3 degree slice make them the longest
coherent features presently known in the universe. Beyond this scale the
universe is statistically homogeneous. More recent results from SDSS are
consistent with the LCRS results.