Towards the statistical detection of the warm-hot intergalactic medium in inter-cluster filaments of the cosmic web

TL;DR

This study presents a novel observational approach using HST/COS to detect the elusive warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM) in inter-cluster filaments, providing tentative evidence of its presence through absorption line excesses.

Contribution

It introduces a new method targeting inter-cluster filaments and reports tentative detection of WHIM signatures via absorption line excesses near galaxy clusters.

Findings

Tentative excesses of HI, NLA, BLA, and OVI lines near cluster pairs.

Higher covering fractions of BLAs suggest presence of WHIM in filaments.

Most excesses of NLAs and BLAs are likely intergalactic rather than galactic.

Abstract

Modern analyses of structure formation predict a universe tangled in a 'cosmic web' of dark matter and diffuse baryons. These theories further predict that at low-z, a significant fraction of the baryons will be shock-heated to $T \sim 10^{5}-10^{7}$K yielding a warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM), but whose actual existence has eluded a firm observational confirmation. We present a novel experiment to detect the WHIM, by targeting the putative filaments connecting galaxy clusters. We use HST/COS to observe a remarkable QSO sightline that passes within $\Delta d = 3$ Mpc from the 7 inter-cluster axes connecting 7 independent cluster-pairs at redshifts $0.1 \le z \le 0.5$. We find tentative excesses of total HI, narrow HI (NLA; Doppler parameters $b<50$ km/s), broad HI (BLA; $b \ge 50$ km/s) and OVI absorption lines within rest-frame velocities of $\Delta v \lesssim 1000$ km/s from the cluster-pairs redshifts, corresponding to $\sim 2$, $\sim 1.7$, $\sim 6$ and $\sim 4$ times their field expectations, respectively. Although the excess of OVI likely comes from gas close to individual galaxies, we conclude that most of the excesses of NLAs and BLAs are truly intergalactic. We find that the covering fractions, $f_c$, of BLAs close to cluster-pairs are $\sim 4-7$ times higher than the random expectation (at the $\sim 2 \sigma$ c.l.), whereas the $f_c$ of NLAs and OVI are not significantly enhanced. We argue that a larger relative excess of BLAs compared to those of NLAs close to cluster-pairs may be a signature of the WHIM in inter-cluster filaments. By extending the present analysis to tens of sightlines our experiment offers a promising route to detect the WHIM.