Galaxies in the simulated cosmic web

I. Filament identification and properties

¹ Laboratory of Astrophysics, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Observatoire de Sauverny, 1290 Versoix, Switzerland
² School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
³ GEPI, Observatoire de Paris, Université PSL, CNRS, 5 Place Jules Janssen, 92190 Meudon, France

^⋆ Corresponding author: yannick.bahe@nottingham.ac.uk

Received: 7 February 2025
Accepted: 23 June 2025

Abstract

As the environment harbouring the majority of galaxies, filaments are thought to play a key role in the co-evolution of galaxies and the cosmic web. In this first part of a series to understand the link between galaxies and filaments through cosmological simulations, we address two major current obstacles on this path: the difficulty of a meaningful filament identification, and their poorly constrained properties and internal structure. We use the public EAGLE and TNG100 simulations to build physically motivated filament catalogues with the DisPerSE algorithm based on the dark matter (DM) field at redshifts z = 0 and z = 2, explicitly accounting for the multi-scale nature of filaments and carefully validating our results. Filament widths, lengths, and densities vary by factors of ≈5−100 in both simulations, highlighting the heterogeneous nature of filaments as a cosmic environment. All filaments are relatively thin, with overdensity profiles of galaxies, DM, and gas dropping to the cosmic mean within at most ≈3 Mpc from their spines. In contrast with groups and clusters, filament cores are highly substructure dominated, by as much as ≈80%. Filament gas maps reveal rich temperature and density structures that limit the applicability of simple cylindrically symmetric models. The EAGLE and TNG100 simulations both show that z = 2 filament spines are traced by overdense cool gas in pressure equilibrium with a > 10 times hotter envelope. However, significant differences in the details between their predicted gas property maps imply that individual simulations cannot yet describe the baryon structure of filaments with certainty. Finally, we compare our fiducial filament network to one constructed from galaxies. The two differ in many aspects, but the distance of a galaxy to its nearest galaxy-based filament still serves as a statistical proxy for its true environment.