The cosmic web is the connected pattern of matter sheets, filaments and dense nodes surrounding cosmic voids. Collapse is generally anisotropic: a region can contract strongly in one direction before the others. The Zeldovich approximation makes this mechanism explicit through the principal directions of the initial deformation. Collapse along one, two or three directions gives the intuitive sequence of sheet, filament and compact concentration, although subsequent shell crossing and nonlinear dynamics complicate that picture.
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