We present and study cosmic voids identified using the watershed void finder VIDE in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 9, compare these voids to ones identified in mock catalogs, and assess the impact of the survey mask on void statistics such as number functions, ellipticity distributions, and radial density profiles. The nearly 1,000 identified voids span three nearly volume-limited samples from redshift z = 0.43 to 0.7. For comparison we use 98 of the publicly available 2LPT-based mock galaxy catalogs of Manera et al., and also generate our own mock catalogs by applying a Halo Occupation Distribution model to an N-body simulation. We find that the mask reduces the number density of voids at all scales by a factor of three and slightly skews the relative size distributions. This engenders an increase in the mean ellipticity by roughly 30%. However, we find that radial density profiles are largely robust to the effects of the mask. We see excellent agreement between the data and both mock catalogs, and find no tension between the observed void properties and the properties derived from {Lambda}CDM simulations. We have added the void catalogs from both data and mock galaxy populations discussed in this work to the Public Cosmic Void Catalog at http://www.cosmicvoids.net.
To study the impact of sparsity and galaxy bias on void statistics, we use a single large-volume, high-resolution N-body simulation to compare voids in multiple levels of subsampled dark matter, halo populations, and mock galaxies from a Halo Occupation Distribution model tuned to different galaxy survey densities. We focus our comparison on three key observational statistics: number functions, ellipticity distributions, and radial density profiles. We use the hierarchical tree structure of voids to interpret the impacts of sampling density and galaxy bias, and theoretical and empirical functions to describe the statistics in all our sample populations. We are able to make simple adjustments to theoretical expectations to offer prescriptions for translating from analytics to the void properties measured in realistic observations. We find that sampling density has a much larger effect on void sizes than galaxy bias. At lower tracer density, small voids disappear and the remaining voids are larger, more spherical, and have slightly steeper profiles. When a proper lower mass threshold is chosen, voids in halo distributions largely mimic those found in galaxy populations, except for ellipticities, where galaxy bias leads to higher values. We use the void density profile of Hamaus et al. (2014) to show that voids follow a self-similar and universal trend, allowing simple translations between voids studied in dark matter and voids identified in galaxy surveys. We have added the mock void catalogs used in this work to the Public Cosmic Void Catalog at http://www.cosmicvoids.net.
