PROBING TOPOLOGICAL RELATIONS BETWEEN HIGH-DENSITY AND LOW-DENSITY REGIONS OF 2MASS WITH HEXAGON CELLS

Abstract

We introduce a new 2-D hexagon technique to probe the topological structure of the universe, in which we map regions of the sky with high and low galaxy densities onto a 2-D lattice of hexagon unit cells, We define filled cells as corresponding to high density regions and empty cells as corresponding to low density region. The number of filled cells and empty cells are kept same by controlling the size of the cells. By analyzing the six neighbors of each hexagon we can get and compare statistical topological properties of the high density and low density regions in the universe, in order to have a better understanding of the evolution of the universe. We apply this hexagon method on 2MASS data and discover significant topological differences between the high density and low density regions. Both regions have significant (>5 Sigma) topological shifts from the binomial distribution or the random distribution.