On the relative effect of nodes and filaments of the cosmic web on the quenching of galaxies and the orientation of their spin

TL;DR

This study uses the IllustrisTNG simulation to analyze how cosmic web features influence galaxy properties, finding star-formation is most affected by cosmic web proximity, while galaxy spin orientation is less impacted and more independent of local environment.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the differential impact of cosmic web features on galaxy properties, highlighting the potential of galaxy spin orientation for cosmic web detection.

Findings

Star-formation varies strongly with cosmic web proximity.

Galaxy spin orientation shows weak dependence on cosmic web features.

Local environment influences star-formation more than cosmic web features.

Abstract

Filaments and clusters of the cosmic web have an impact on the properties of galaxies, switching off their star-formation, contributing to the build-up of their stellar mass, and influencing the acquisition of their angular momentum. In this work we make use of the IllustrisTNG simulation, coupled with the DisPerSE cosmic web extraction algorithm, to test which is the galaxy property most affected by the cosmic web and, conversely, to assess the differential impact of the various cosmic web features on a given galaxy property. Our aim is to use this information to better understand galaxy evolution and to identify on which galaxy property future efforts should focus to detect the cosmic web from the galaxy distribution. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the relation between galaxy properties and cosmic web features. We also perform extensive tests in which we try to disentangle the effect of local overdensities of galaxies on their properties from the effect of the large scale structure environment. Our results show that star-formation is the quantity that shows the strongest variation with the distances from the cosmic web features, but it is also the one that shows the strongest relation to the local environment of galaxies. On the other hand, the direction of the angular momentum of galaxies is the property that shows the weakest trends with distance from cosmic web features, while also being more independent from the local environment of galaxies. We conclude that the direction of the angular momentum of galaxies and its use to improve our detection of the cosmic web features could be the focus of futures studies benefiting from larger statistical samples.