Star Formation and Gas Phase History of the Cosmic Web

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for tracking galaxy environments in large-scale simulations, revealing that most star formation occurs in filaments at intermediate redshifts and that gas phases vary significantly across cosmic structures.

Contribution

It develops a structure finding algorithm to analyze the evolution of cosmic web structures and their gas and star formation histories in simulations.

Findings

Majority of star formation occurs in filaments at z ~ 3.

Star formation shifts from low to high contrast regions in filaments over time.

Gas phase distribution varies across cosmic structures, with filaments hosting most of the WHIM.

Abstract

We present a new method of tracking and characterizing the environment in which galaxies and their associated circumgalactic medium evolve. We use a structure finding algorithm we developed to self-consistently parse and follow the evolution of poor clusters, filaments and voids in large scale simulations. We trace the complete evolution of the baryons in the gas phase and the star formation history within each structure in our simulated volume. We vary the structure measure threshold to probe the complex inner structure of star forming regions in poor clusters, filaments and voids. We find the majority of star formation occurs in cold, condensed gas in filaments at intermediate redshifts (z ~ 3). We also show that much of the star formation above a redshift z = 3 occurs in low contrast regions of filaments, but as the density contrast increases at lower redshift star formation switches to the high contrast regions, or inner parts, of filaments. Since filaments bridge the void and cluster regions, it suggests that the majority of star formation occurs in galaxies in intermediate density regions prior to the accretion onto poor clusters. We find that at the present epoch, the gas phase distribution is 43.1%, 30.0%, 24.7% and 2.2% in the diffuse, WHIM, hot halo and condensed phases, respectively. The majority of the WHIM is associated with filaments. However, their multiphase nature and the fact that the star formation occurs predominantly in the condensed gas both point to the importance of not conflating the filamentary environment with the WHIM. Moreover, in our simulation volume 8.77%, 79.1%, 2.11% of the gas at z = 0 is located in poor clusters, filaments, and voids, respectively. We find that both filaments and poor clusters are multiphase environments distinguishing themselves by different distribution of gas phases.