The Network Behind the Cosmic Web

Understand

The concept of the cosmic web, viewing the Universe as a set of discrete galaxies held together by gravity, is deeply engrained in cosmology.

• Yet, little is known about the most effective construction and the characteristics of the underlying network.
• Here we explore seven network construction algorithms that use various galaxy properties, from their location, to their size and relative velocity, to assign a network to galaxy distributions provided by both simulations and observations.
• We find that a model relying only on spatial proximity offers the best correlations between the physical characteristics of the connected galaxies.