Mapping and characterisation of cosmic filaments in galaxy cluster outskirts: strategies and forecasts for observations from simulations [GA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2004.08408


Upcoming wide-field surveys are well-suited to studying the growth of galaxy clusters by tracing galaxy and gas accretion along cosmic filaments. We use hydrodynamic simulations of volumes surrounding 324 clusters from \textsc{The ThreeHundred} project to develop a framework for identifying and characterising these filamentary structures, and associating galaxies with them. We define 3-dimensional reference filament networks reaching $5R_{200}$ based on the underlying gas distribution and quantify their recovery using mock galaxy samples mimicking observations such as those of the WEAVE Wide-Field Cluster Survey. Since massive galaxies trace filaments, they are best recovered by mass-weighting galaxies or imposing a bright limit (e.g. $>L^$) on their selection. We measure the transverse gas density profile of filaments, derive a characteristic filament radius of $\simeq0.7$–$1~h^{-1}\rm{Mpc}$, and use this to assign galaxies to filaments. For different filament extraction methods we find that at $R>R_{200}$, $\sim15$–$20%$ of galaxies with $M_>3 \times 10^9 M_{\odot}$ are in filaments, increasing to $\sim60%$ for galaxies more massive than the Milky-Way. The fraction of galaxies in filaments is independent of cluster mass and dynamical state, and is a function of cluster-centric distance, increasing from $\sim13$% at $5R_{200}$ to $\sim21$% at $1.5R_{200}$. As a bridge to the design of observational studies, we measure the purity and completeness of different filament galaxy selection strategies. Encouragingly, the overall 3-dimensional filament networks and $\sim67$% of the galaxies associated with them are recovered from 2-dimensional galaxy positions.

Read this paper on arXiv…

U. Kuchner, A. Aragón-Salamanca, F. Pearce, et. al.
Tue, 21 Apr 20
83/90

Comments: 22 pages, 17 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS