Detecting Galaxy-Filament Alignments in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III

Understand

Previous studies have shown the filamentary structures in the cosmic web influence the alignments of nearby galaxies.

• We study this effect in the LOWZ sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey using the "Cosmic Web Reconstruction" filament catalogue.
• We find that LOWZ galaxies exhibit a small but statistically significant alignment in the direction parallel to the orientation of nearby filaments.
• This effect is detectable even in the absence of nearby galaxy clusters, which suggests it is an effect from the matter distribution in the filament.