Rivers of Gas I.: Unveiling The Properties of High Redshift Filaments

Abstract

At high redshift, the cosmic web is widely expected to have a significant impact on the morphologies, dynamics and star formation rates of the galaxies embedded within it, underscoring the need for a comprehensive study of the properties of such a filamentary network. With this goal in mind, we perform an analysis of high-$z$ gas and dark matter (DM) filaments around a Milky Way-like progenitor simulated with the {\sc ramses} adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code from cosmic scales ($\sim$1 Mpc) down to the virial radius of its DM halo host ($\sim$20 kpc at $z=4$). Radial density profiles of both gas and DM filaments are found to have the same functional form, namely a plummer-like profile modified to take into account the wall within which these filaments are embedded. Measurements of the typical filament core radius $r_0$ from the simulation are consistent with that of isothermal cylinders in hydrostatic equilibrium. Such an analytic model also predicts a redshift evolution for the core radius of filaments in fair agreement with the measured value for DM $(r_0\propto (1+z{)}^{-3.18\pm 0.28})$. Gas filament cores grow as $(r_0\propto (1+z{)}^{-2.72\pm 0.26})$. In both gas and DM, temperature and vorticity sharply drop at the edge of filaments, providing an excellent way to constrain the outer filament radius. When feedback is included the gas temperature and vorticity fields are strongly perturbed, hindering such a measurement in the vicinity of the galaxy. However, the core radius of the filaments as measured from the gas density field is largely unaffected by feedback, and the median central density is only reduced by about 20%.

19 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (27)

• The EAGLE project: Simulating the evolution and assembly of galaxies and their environments
• Introducing the Illustris Project: Simulating the coevolution of dark and visible matter in the Universe
• The James Webb Space Telescope
• Cold streams in early massive hot haloes as the main mode of galaxy formation
• Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Likelihoods and Parameters from the WMAP data
• Simba: Cosmological Simulations with Black Hole Growth and Feedback
• Bimodal gas accretion in the Horizon-MareNostrum galaxy formation simulation
• On the onset of galactic winds in quiescent star forming galaxies
• Spin alignment of dark matter haloes in filaments and walls
• Initial Conditions for Large Cosmological Simulations
• Gas filaments of the cosmic web located around active galaxies in a proto-cluster
• First star-forming structures in fuzzy cosmic filaments
• MusE GAs FLOw and Wind (MEGAFLOW) II. A study of gas accretion around $z\approx 1$ star-forming galaxies with background quasars
• Lighting the Universe with filaments
• Properties of gas phases around cosmic filaments at z=0 in the Illustris-TNG simulation
• Impact of Lyman alpha pressure on metal-poor dwarf galaxies
• Spatially Resolved Gas Kinematics within a Ly$\alpha$ Nebula: Evidence for Large-scale Rotation
• The angular momentum of baryons and dark matter halos revisited
• Alignment between filaments and galaxy spins from the MaNGA integral-field survey
• Evolution of cosmic filaments and of their galaxy population from MHD cosmological simulations
• Stacking the Cosmic Web in Fluorescent Lyman alpha Emission with MUSE
• The Role of Cold Flows and Reservoirs in Galaxy Formation With Strong Feedback
• Ly$\alpha$ view around a z=2.84 hyperluminous QSO at a node of the cosmic web
• On the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability with smooth initial conditions -- Linear theory and simulations
• Local stability of a gravitating filament: a dispersion relation
• Simulating MOS science on the ELT: Ly$\alpha$ forest tomography
• Detecting the Cosmic Web: Lyα Emission from Simulated Filaments at z=3

Cited by in corpus (19)

• Efficient Formation of Massive Galaxies at Cosmic Dawn by Feedback-Free Starbursts
• Properties of gas phases around cosmic filaments at z=0 in the Illustris-TNG simulation
• Relative distribution of dark matter, gas, and stars around cosmic filaments in the IllustrisTNG simulation
• The effect of cosmic web filaments on galaxy evolution
• Flows around galaxies. I. The dependency of galaxy connectivity on cosmic environments and effects on the star-formation rate
• Thermal Instabilities and Shattering in the High-Redshift WHIM: Convergence Criteria and Implications for Low-Metallicity Strong HI Absorbers
• On the Cosmic Web Elongation in Fuzzy Dark Matter Cosmologies: Effects on Density Profiles, Shapes and Alignments of Halos
• Quenching in Cosmic Sheets: Tracing the Impact of Large Scale Structure Collapse on the Evolution of Dwarf Galaxies
• Stellar angular momentum can be controlled from cosmological initial conditions
• Tracking Halo Orbits and Their Mass Evolution around Large-scale Filaments
• Cosmic Web Dissection in Fuzzy Dark Matter Cosmologies
• The large-scale structure around the Fornax-Eridanus Complex
• Dissecting a miniature universe: A multi-wavelength view of galaxy quenching in the Shapley supercluster
• The Power of the Cosmic Web
• Cold-mode and hot-mode accretion in galaxy formation: an entropy approach
• Interference in Fuzzy Dark Matter Filaments: Idealised Models and Statistics
• Dissecting Cosmological Filaments at High Redshifts: Emergence of Spaghetti-type Flow Inside DM Haloes
• A 15 Mpc rotating galaxy filament at redshift z = 0.032
• The galaxy-environment connection revealed by constrained simulations