A MeerKAT study of a neutral hydrogen rich grouping of galaxies with megaparsec-scale filamentary-like structure

Abstract

Environmental effects within cosmological overdensities, such as galaxy groups and clusters, have been shown to impact galaxies and their cold gas reservoirs and thereby provide constraints on galaxy evolution models. Galaxy groups foster frequent galaxy-galaxy interactions, making them rich environments in which to study galaxy transformation. In this work, we study a serendipitously discovered large overdensity of HI galaxies at z~0.04. The galaxies appear to lie in a filamentary-like structure of megaparsec scale. MeerKAT's angular resolution and field of view allow us to spatially resolve the HI galaxies while simultaneously probing large-scale structure. The HI and sub-arcsec Dark Energy Survey (DES) imaging reveal a large number of interacting galaxies in this collective group. MeerKAT data enables us to derive HI masses and investigate interacting galaxies. We use DES and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) data to quantify the star formation rates, stellar masses, and stellar morphologies of member galaxies and compare these with field scaling relations. To place this discovery and the environmental effects in context, we use the SIMBA simulation to investigate the prevalence of qualitatively similar HI overdensities and their large-scale morphological properties. This enables a prediction of how frequently such structures might be serendipitously discovered with MeerKAT and SKA-Mid HI observations in comparable observation time. The combination of spatially resolved HI data and optical imaging reveals a group rich in interactions, suggesting environmental processes are already shaping galaxy properties within the structure. More of these serendipitous discoveries are expected and, alongside ongoing targeted programmes, these will provide a rich sample to study galaxy transformation and enable a MeerKAT HI perspective on large-scale structure, including filaments.

20 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables; Accepted for publication in A&A

References in corpus (21)

• The EAGLE project: Simulating the evolution and assembly of galaxies and their environments
• Simba: Cosmological Simulations with Black Hole Growth and Feedback
• The Circumgalactic Medium
• Galaxy Groups in the SDSS DR4: I. The Catalogue and Basic Properties
• The Dark Energy Survey Data Release 2
• SoFiA: a flexible source finder for 3D spectral line data
• SoFiA 2 -- An automated, parallel HI source finding pipeline for the WALLABY survey
• The MeerKAT Galaxy Cluster Legacy Survey I. Survey Overview and Highlights
• Galaxy Cold Gas Contents in Modern Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulations
• Galaxy groups in the low-redshift Universe
• An Extended Halo-based Group/Cluster finder: application to the DESI legacy imaging surveys DR8
• MIGHTEE-HI: The HI emission project of the MeerKAT MIGHTEE survey
• Scaling Properties of Galaxy Groups
• Reproducing sub-millimetre galaxy number counts with cosmological hydrodynamic simulations
• MIGHTEE-HI: The baryonic Tully-Fisher relation over the last billion years
• MHONGOOSE -- A MeerKAT Nearby Galaxy HI Survey
• A MeerKAT view of pre-processing in the Fornax A group
• The CGM at Cosmic Noon with KCWI: Outflows from a Star-forming Galaxy at z=2.071
• MIGHTEE-HI: deep spectral line observations of the COSMOS field
• MIGHTEE-HI: Discovery of an HI-rich galaxy group at z = 0.044 with MeerKAT
• A serendipitous discovery of HI-rich galaxy groups with MeerKAT