The relation of galaxies and dark matter haloes to the filamentary cosmic web

TL;DR

This study uses the Millennium Simulation to analyze how galaxies and dark matter haloes are distributed within the cosmic web, revealing environmental influences on galaxy properties and their relation to large-scale structure.

Contribution

It provides a detailed quantification of galaxy and halo distribution within the cosmic web and examines how environment affects galaxy properties like star formation rates.

Findings

The cosmic web contains 35% of cosmic mass in a small volume.

Web galaxies are more likely to be satellites, especially at lower stellar masses.

Environmental differences mainly stem from halo mass distribution variations.

Abstract

We use the Millennium Simulation to study the relation of galaxies and dark matter haloes to the cosmic web. We define the web as the unique, fully connected, percolating object with (unsmoothed) matter density everywhere exceeding 5.25 times the cosmic mean. This object contains 35\% of all cosmic mass but occupies only 0.62\% of all cosmic volume. It contains 26\% of dark matter haloes of mass $10^{11}M_\odot$, rising to 50\% at $10^{12.7}M_\odot$, and to $>90\%$ above $10^{14}M_\odot$. In contrast, it contains 45\% of all galaxies of stellar mass $10^{8.5}M_\odot$, rising to 50\% at $10^{10}M_\odot$, to 60\% at $10^{11}M_\odot$ and to 90\% at $10^{11.5}M_\odot$. This difference arises because a large fraction of all satellite and backsplash galaxies are part of the cosmic web. Indeed, more than 50\% of web galaxies are satellites for stellar masses below that of the Milky Way, rising to about 70\% below $10^{10}M_\odot$, whereas centrals substantially outnumber satellites in the non-web population at all stellar masses. As a result, web galaxies have systematically lower specific star-formation rates (sSFR's) than non-web galaxies. For the latter, the distributions of stellar mass and sSFR are almost independent of web distance. Furthermore, for both central and satellite galaxies, the sSFR distributions at given stellar mass are very similar in and outside the web, once differences in backsplash fraction are accounted for. For the galaxy formation model considered here, differences between web and non-web galaxy populations are almost entirely due to the difference in halo mass distribution between the two environments.