The luminosity, colour and morphology dependence of galaxy filaments in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release Four

Abstract

We have tested for luminosity, colour and morphology dependence of the degree of filamentarity in seven nearly two-dimensional strips from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release Four .(SDSS DR4). The analysis was carried out at various levels of coarse graining allowing us to address different length-scales. We find that the brighter galaxies have a less filamentary distribution than the fainter ones at all levels of coarse graining. The distribution of red galaxies and ellipticals shows a higher degree of filamentarity compared to blue galaxies and spirals, respectively, at low levels of coarse graining. The behaviour is reversed at higher levels of coarse graining. We propose a picture where the ellipticals are densely distributed in the vicinity of the nodes where the filaments intersect while the spirals are sparsely distributed along the entire extent of the filaments. Our findings indicate that the regions with an excess of ellipticals are larger than galaxy clusters, protruding into the filaments. We have also compared the predictions of a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation (the Millennium Run galaxy catalogue) against our results for the SDSS. We find the two to be in agreement for the M* galaxies and for the red galaxies, while the model fails to correctly predict the filamentarity of the brighter galaxies and the blue galaxies.