Poster Presentation Astronomical Society of Australia Annual Scientific Meeting including HWWS 2013

Measuring the environments of proto-clusters in the high redshift universe (#268)

Genevieve Shattow 1
  1. Swinburne, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia

Environment, specifically overdensity, is a common means of identifying proto-clusters in the high redshift universe, but the resulting measurements are highly dependent on both the scale and method used to define overdensity. This leads to three main questions. First, how does a galaxy's "observed" (projected) overdensity in redshift space compare to its three-dimensional overdensity in real-space? In other words, if I measure a simulated galaxy's environment in a method similar to that of an observer, how similar to its real-space environment will it be? The second question is how stable are these comparisons from a statistical point of view? If I look at the same galaxy from several points of view, will its environment change? And third, how does a galaxy's environment change with time - is there a metric that better predicts a galaxy's future environment?