Extragalactic filament detection with a layer smoothing method

Abstract

Filaments are clearly visible in galaxy distributions, but they are hardly detected by computer algorithms. Most methods of filament detection can be used only with numerical simulations of a large-scale structure. New simple and effective methods for the real filament detection should be developed. The method of a smoothed galaxy density field was applied in this work to SDSS data of galaxy positions. Five concentric radial layers of 100 Mpc are appropriate for filaments detection. Two methods were tested for the first layer and one more method is proposed.