Publications (8)4.9 Total impact
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Article: Connecting the cosmic web to the spin of dark halos: implications for galaxy formation
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ABSTRACT: We investigate the alignment of the spin of dark matter halos relative (i) to the surrounding large-scale filamentary structure, and (ii) to the tidal tensor eigenvectors using the Horizon 4pi dark matter simulation which resolves over 43 million dark matter halos at redshift zero. We detect a clear mass transition: the spin of dark matter halos above a critical mass tends to be perpendicular to the closest filament, and aligned with the intermediate axis of the tidal tensor, whereas the spin of low-mass halos is more likely to be aligned with the closest filament. Furthermore, this critical mass of 5 10^12 is redshift-dependent and scales as (1+z)^-2.5. We propose an interpretation of this signal in terms of large-scale cosmic flows. In this picture, most low-mass halos are formed through the winding of flows embedded in misaligned walls; hence they acquire a spin parallel to the axis of the resulting filaments forming at the intersection of these walls. On the other hand, more massive halos are typically the products of later mergers along such filaments, and thus they acquire a spin perpendicular to this direction when their orbital angular momentum is converted into spin. We show that this scenario is consistent with both the measured excess probabilities of alignment w.r.t. the eigen-directions of the tidal tensor, and halo merger histories. On a more qualitative level, it also seems compatible with 3D visualization of the structure of the cosmic web as traced by "smoothed" dark matter simulations or gas tracer particles. Finally, it provides extra support to the disc forming paradigm presented by Pichon et al (2011) as it extends it by characterizing the geometry of secondary infall at high redshift.01/2012; -
Article: SUZAKU Observation of a New Merging Group of Galaxies at a Filamentary Junction
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ABSTRACT: We report on a new merging group of galaxies, Suzaku J1552+2739 at z ~ 0.08 revealed by a SUZAKU observation. The group was found by observing a junction of galaxy filaments optically identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectroscopic data. Suzaku J1552+2739 exhibits an irregular morphology and presents several peaks in its X-ray image. A bright elliptical galaxy, observable in the central peak, allows the localization of the group at z = 0.083. We found a significant hot spot visible in the X-ray hardness map, close to the second peak. The spectroscopic temperature is T = 1.6+0.4-0.1 keV within R500 = 0.6 Mpc and T = 3 - 5 keV in the hot spot. We interpret those results as Suzaku J1552+2739 being located in the center of a major merging process. The observation of a galaxy group showing multiple X-ray peaks and a hot spot at the same time is rare and we believe in particular that the study of Suzaku J1552+2739 potentially presents a significant interest to better understand the dynamical and thermal evolution of the intragroup and intracluster medium, as well as its relation with surrounding environment.01/2011; -
Article: The persistent cosmic web and its filamentary structure II: Illustrations
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ABSTRACT: The recently introduced discrete persistent structure extractor (DisPerSE, Soubie 2010, paper I) is implemented on realistic 3D cosmological simulations and observed redshift catalogues (SDSS); it is found that DisPerSE traces equally well the observed filaments, walls, and voids in both cases. In either setting, filaments are shown to connect onto halos, outskirt walls, which circumvent voids. Indeed this algorithm operates directly on the particles without assuming anything about the distribution, and yields a natural (topologically motivated) self-consistent criterion for selecting the significance level of the identified structures. It is shown that this extraction is possible even for very sparsely sampled point processes, as a function of the persistence ratio. Hence astrophysicists should be in a position to trace and measure precisely the filaments, walls and voids from such samples and assess the confidence of the post-processed sets as a function of this threshold, which can be expressed relative to the expected amplitude of shot noise. In a cosmic framework, this criterion is comparable to friend of friend for the identifications of peaks, while it also identifies the connected filaments and walls, and quantitatively recovers the full set of topological invariants (Betti numbers) {\sl directly from the particles} as a function of the persistence threshold. This criterion is found to be sufficient even if one particle out of two is noise, when the persistence ratio is set to 3-sigma or more. The algorithm is also implemented on the SDSS catalogue and used to locat interesting configurations of the filamentary structure. In this context we carried the identification of an ``optically faint'' cluster at the intersection of filaments through the recent observation of its X-ray counterpart by SUZAKU. The corresponding filament catalogue will be made available online. Comment: A higher resolution version is available at http://www.iap.fr/users/sousbie together with complementary material (movie and data). Submitted to MNRASMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 09/2010; · 4.90 Impact Factor -
Article: The Skeleton: Connecting Large Scale Structures to Galaxy Formation
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ABSTRACT: We report on two quantitative, morphological estimators of the filamentary structure of the Cosmic Web, the so-called global and local skeletons. The first, based on a global study of the matter density gradient flow, allows us to study the connectivity between a density peak and its surroundings, with direct relevance to the anisotropic accretion via cold flows on galactic halos. From the second, based on a local constraint equation involving the derivatives of the field, we can derive predictions for powerful statistics, such as the differential length and the relative saddle to extrema counts of the Cosmic web as a function of density threshold (with application to percolation of structures and connectivity), as well as a theoretical framework to study their cosmic evolution through the onset of gravity-induced non-linearities. Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures; proceedings of the "Invisible Universe" 200911/2009; -
Article: On the Onset of Stochasticity in $\Lambda$CDM Cosmological Simulations
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ABSTRACT: The onset of stochasticity is measured in $\Lambda$CDM cosmological simulations using a set of classical observables. It is quantified as the local derivative of the logarithm of the dispersion of a given observable (within a set of different simulations differing weakly through their initial realization), with respect to the cosmic growth factor. In an Eulerian framework, it is shown here that chaos appears at small scales, where dynamic is non-linear, while it vanishes at larger scales, allowing the computation of a critical transition scale corresponding to ~ 3.5 Mpc/h. This picture is confirmed by Lagrangian measurements which show that the distribution of substructures within clusters is partially sensitive to initial conditions, with a critical mass upper bound scaling roughly like the perturbation's amplitude to the power 0.15. The corresponding characteristic mass, $M_{\rm crit}=2 10^{13} M_{\odot}$, is roughly of the order of the critical mass of non linearities at z=1 and accounts for the decoupling induced by the dark energy triggered acceleration. The sensitivity to detailed initial conditions spills to some of the overall physical properties of the host halo (spin and velocity dispersion tensor orientation) while other "global" properties are quite robust and show no chaos (mass, spin parameter, connexity and center of mass position). This apparent discrepancy may reflect the fact that quantities which are integrals over particles rapidly average out details of difference in orbits, while the other observables are more sensitive to the detailed environment of forming halos and reflect the non-linear scale coupling characterizing the environments of halos. Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication, MNRAS03/2008; -
Article: The 3D skeleton of the SDSS
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ABSTRACT: The length of the three-dimensional filaments observed in the fourth public data-release of the SDSS is measured using the {\em local skeleton} method. It consists in defining the set of points where the gradient of the smoothed density field is extremal along its isocontours, with some additional constraints on local curvature to probe actual ridges in the galaxy distribution. A good fit to the mean filament length per unit volume, $\cal{L}$, in the SDSS survey is found to be ${\cal{L}}=(52500\pm6500) (L/{\rm Mpc})^{-1.75\pm0.06}\rm{Mpc}/(100 \rm{Mpc})^{3}$ for $8.2 \leq L \leq 16.4$ Mpc, where $L$ is the smoothing length in Mpc. This result, which deviates only slightly, as expected, from the trivial behavior ${\cal{L}} \propto L^{-2}$, is in excellent agreement with a $\Lambda$CDM cosmology, as long as the matter density parameter remains in the range $0.25 < \Omega_{\rm matter} < 0.4$ at one sigma confidence level, considering the universe is flat. These measurements, which are in fact dominated by linear dynamics, are not significantly sensitive to observational biases such as redshift distortion, edge effects, incompleteness, and biasing between the galaxy distribution and the dark matter distribution. Hence it is argued that the local skeleton is a rather promising and discriminating tool for the analysis of filamentary structures in three-dimensional galaxy surveys.03/2006; -
Article: The LEDA galaxy distribution: I. Maps of the Local Universe
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ABSTRACT: In order to investigate the properties of large-scale structures of galaxies in the universe, we present an analysis of their spatial distribution at z$<$0.033. We used the LEDA extragalactic database containing over 1 million of galaxies covering the all-sky and the SDSS data included in the public release DR1, yielding to a sample of around 134,000 galaxies having a measured redshift in two survey areas representing 690 sq. degrees. The results of the study are 2D, 3D maps and magnitude number counts of galaxies, drawn from B-band samples. Movies and high resolution figures are available on http://www-obs.univ-lyon1.fr/cosmologie/helene.html Comment: Received November 30, 2003; accepted February 2004, in press03/2004; -
Article: The abundance of Lyman-( \alpha ) emitters in hierarchical models
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ABSTRACT: We present predictions for the abundance of Ly-$\alpha$ emitters in hierarchical structure formation models. We use the {\tt GALFORM} semi-analytical model to explore the impact on the predicted counts of varying assumptions about the escape fraction of Ly-$\alpha$ photons, the redshift at which the universe reionised and the cosmological density parameter. A model with a fixed escape fraction gives a remarkably good match to the observed counts over a wide redshift interval. We present predictions for the expected counts in a typical observation with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument proposed for the Very Large Telescope.
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Institutions
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2012
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Institut d'astrophysique de Paris
Paris, Ile-de-France, France
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2010
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The University of Tokyo
- Department of Physics
Tokyo, Tokyo-to, Japan
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