Caught in the cosmic web: environmental effects on subhalo abundance and internal density profiles

Abstract

Using the high-resolution $N$-body cosmological simulation COLOR, we explore the cosmic web (CW) environmental effects on subhalo populations and their internal properties. We use CaCTus, which incorporates an implementation of the state-of-the-art segmentation method NEXUS+, to delineate the simulation volume into nodes, filaments, walls, and voids. We group host haloes by virial mass and segment each mass bin into consecutive CW elements. This reveals that subhalo populations in hosts within specific environments differ on average from the cosmic mean. The subhalo mass function is affected strongly, where hosts in filaments typically contain more subhaloes ($5$ to $20\%$), while hosts in voids are subhalo-poor, with $25\%$ fewer subhaloes. We find that the abundance of the most massive subhaloes, with reduced masses of $\mu \equiv M_{\mathrm{sub}}/M_{200}$ is most sensitive to the CW environment. A corresponding picture emerges when looking at subhalo mass fractions, $f_{\mathrm{sub}}$, where the filament hosts are significantly more `granular' (having higher $f_{\mathrm{sub}}$) than the cosmic mean, while the void hosts have much smoother density distributions (with $f_{\mathrm{sub}}$ lower by $2$ - $20\%$ than the mean). Finally, when we look at the subhalo internal kinematic $V_{\max }$-$R_{\max }$ relations, we find that subhaloes located in the void and wall hosts exhibit density profiles with lower concentrations than the mean, while the filament hosts demonstrate much more concentrated mass profiles. Across all our samples, the effect of the CW environment generally strengthens with decreasing host halo virial mass. Our results show that host location in the large-scale CW introduces significant systematic effects on internal subhalo properties and population statistics.

14 pages, 5 figures, and 4 tables; accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics after major revision

References in corpus (35)

• Too big to fail? The puzzling darkness of massive Milky Way subhaloes
• A Vast Thin Plane of Co-rotating Dwarf Galaxies Orbiting the Andromeda Galaxy
• Properties of Dark Matter Haloes in Clusters, Filaments, Sheets and Voids
• Dark matter and cosmic structure
• Four phases of angular-momentum buildup in high-z galaxies: from cosmic-web streams through an extended ring to disc and bulge
• The Evolution of Dark Matter Halo Properties in Clusters, Filaments, Sheets and Voids
• Dark Matter Substructure in Numerical Simulations: A Tale of Discreteness Noise, Runaway Instabilities, and Artificial Disruption
• Spin alignment of dark matter haloes in filaments and walls
• Too Big to Fail in the Local Group
• SubHaloes going Notts: The SubHalo-Finder Comparison Project
• The Population of Dark Matter Subhaloes: Mass Functions and Average Mass Loss Rates
• The abundance of (not just) dark matter haloes
• The Dependence of the Mass Assembly History of Cold Dark Matter Halos on Environment
• Environmental Dependence of Cold Dark Matter Halo Formation
• Cosmic Web of Galaxies in the COSMOS Field: Public Catalog and Different Quenching for Centrals and Satellites
• The Cosmic Ballet II: Spin alignment of galaxies and haloes with large-scale filaments in the EAGLE simulation
• Cosmic web alignments with the shape, angular momentum and peculiar velocities of dark matter haloes
• The alignment of satellite galaxies and cosmic filaments: observations and simulations
• The statistics of the subhalo abundance of dark matter haloes
• Milky Way mass constraints from the Galactic satellite gap
• Vast planes of satellites in a high resolution simulation of the Local Group: comparison to Andromeda
• Caught in the cosmic web: Environmental effect on halo concentrations, shape, and spin
• Galaxy properties and the cosmic web in simulations
• The alignment of dark matter halos with the cosmic web
• Subhalo statistics of galactic halos: beyond the resolution limit
• Halo abundances within the cosmic web
• LCDM halo substructure properties revealed with high resolution and large volume cosmological simulations
• The Cosmic V-Web
• The spatial distribution of Milky Way satellites, gaps in streams and the nature of dark matter
• The effect of environment on AGN activity: the properties of radio and optical AGN in void, isolated and group galaxies
• Galaxy properties in the cosmic web of EAGLE simulation
• Connections between galaxy properties and halo formation time in the cosmic web
• Cosmic Web Dissection in Fuzzy Dark Matter Cosmologies
• Anisotropic satellite accretion onto the Local Group with HESTIA
• NeutralUniverseMachine: How Filaments and Dark Matter Halo Influence the Galaxy Cold Gas Content

Cited by in corpus (2)

• The impact of cosmic filaments on the abundance of satellite galaxies
• CWTHF: Subhalo Identification with Continuous Wavelet Transform