Density and temperature of cosmic-web filaments on scales of tens of megaparsecs

Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, 91405 Orsay, France
e-mail: hideki.tanimura@ias.u-psud.fr

Received: 21 November 2019
Accepted: 18 March 2020

Abstract

We studied physical properties of matter in 24 544 filaments ranging from 30 to 100 Mpc in length, identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We stacked the Comptonization y map produced by the Planck Collaboration around the filaments, excluding the resolved galaxy groups and clusters above a mass of ∼3 × 10¹³ M_⊙. We detected the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich signal for the first time at a significance of 4.4σ in filamentary structures on such a large scale. We also stacked the Planck cosmic microwave background lensing convergence map in the same manner and detected the lensing signal at a significance of 8.1σ. To estimate physical properties of the matter, we considered an isothermal cylindrical filament model with a density distribution following a β-model (β = 2/3). Assuming that the gas distribution follows the dark matter distribution, we estimate that the central gas and matter overdensity δ and gas temperature T_e are δ = 19.0_−12.1^+27.3 and T_e = 1.4_−0.4^+0.4 × 10⁶ K, which results in a measured baryon fraction of 0.080_−0.051^+0.116 × Ω_b.