2015/06/26 by Alice Pisani, Pisani, Alice, P. M. Sutter +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #astro-ph.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1506.07982
12 pages, 12 figures and 2 tables, prepared for submission to MNRAS. Comments welcome ( [email protected] )
arxiv created 2015/06/26 · openalex publication_date 2015/06/26 · arxiv updated 2015/06/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
How do peculiar velocities affect observed voids? To answer this question we use the VIDE toolkit to identify voids in mock galaxy populations embedded within an N-body simulation both with and without peculiar velocities included. We compare the resulting void populations to assess the impact on void properties. We find that void abundances and spherically-averaged radial density profiles are mildly affected by peculiar velocities. However, peculiar velocities can distort by up to 10% the shapes for a particular subset of voids depending on the void size and density contrast, which can lead to increased variance in Alcock-Paczyński test. We offer guidelines for performing optimal cuts on the void catalogue to reduce this variance by removing the most severely affected voids while preserving the unaffected ones. In addition, since this shape distortion is largely limited to the line of sight, we show that the void radii are only affected at the ∼ 10% level and the macrocenter positions at the ∼ 20% (even before performing cuts), meaning that cosmological probes based on the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe and gravitational lensing are not severely impacted by peculiar velocities.