Exploring the Texture of the Universe: Lacunarity Analysis of Cosmological Large Scale Structure
Participants: Maurice McKay (Major: Physics and Applied Mathematics, Class of 2008); Kyle McCormick (Major: Physics; Projected graduation: Spring 2009)
Faculty: Jonas Murieka, Assistant Professor, (Physics)
Abstract: Current research in cosmology is focused on two main issues: the cause of the observed large scale clustering of galaxies, and the nature of the underlying geometry of the Universe. Determination of the latter will answer a very important question: will the Universe continue to expand indefinitely, or will it eventually re-collapse on itself sometime in the far future? Similarly, an understanding of how and why matter is structured in “clumps” (large filaments separated by even large voids) will give crucial information about the early moments following the Big Bang. In this project, a technique known as Lacunarity analysis, which classifies structure by studying the distribution of voids, is applied to both theoretical models of the Universe, as well as real clustering data of over 50 million galaxies from the Sloan Digitial Sky Survey. The aim is to see if actual geometric curvature information may be extracted from observational clustering data, which will provide an innovative and important new application of scaling statistics to the field of cosmology.
Presented: PASCOS ’08: 14th International Symposium on Particle Physics, String Theory, and Cosmology, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada (02-06 June 2008)
Funding: Cottrell College Science Award, Research Corporation; and Rains Research Funding
Image caption (above): Theoretical models of galaxy clustering such as these can replicate the actual observed clustering of galaxies observed in the Universe. Understanding how they are structured can yield great insight into both the seconds following the Big Bang, as well as the eventual fate of the Universe.