Yongfeng Wu

Date of Award

2010

Level of Access Assigned by Author

Campus-Only Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Physics

Advisor

David Batuski

Second Committee Member

Andre Khalil

Third Committee Member

Neil Comins

Abstract

Following novel development and adaptation of the Metric Space Technique (MST), a multi-scale morphological analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 5 (DR5) was performed. We adapted the technique to perform a space-scale morphological analysis by filtering the galaxy point distributions with a smoothing Gaussian function, thus giving quantitative structural information on a range of scale sizes. The analysis was performed on 2-D (a dozen slices of a volume of space containing many newly measured galaxies from the SDSS DR5 survey) and 3-D data. Using the MST, observational data was compared to galaxy samples taken from N-body simulations with current best estimates of cosmological parameters and from random catalogs. By using the maximal ranking method among MST output functions we also developed a way to quantify the overall similarity of the observed samples with the simulated samples. MST does uncover some new multi-scale morphological properties and appears to be a good tool to measure those properties by clearly distinguishing the samples.

Download

Files over 10MB may be slow to open. For best results, right-click and select "save as..."

Share