The impact of cosmic filaments on starburst galaxies across cosmic times

¹ Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg, UMR 7550, CNRS, Université de Strasbourg, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
² Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, UMR 7095, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, 98 bis boulevard Arago, 75014 Paris, France
³ SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Landleven 12, 9747 AD, Groningen, The Netherlands
⁴ Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen, Postbus 800, 9700 AV, Groningen, The Netherlands
⁵ European Space Agency/ESTEC, Keplerlaan 1, 2201 AZ, Noordwijk, The Netherlands
⁶ Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, Einsteinweg 55, 2333 CC, Leiden, The Netherlands
⁷ Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, CNES, LAM, Marseille, France
⁸ The University of Texas at Austin, 2515 Speedway Blvd Stop C1400 Austin, TX 78712, USA
⁹ Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
¹⁰ Cosmic Dawn centre (DAWN), Denmark
¹¹ Institute for Computational Cosmology, Department of Physics, Durham University, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom
¹² Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Riverside, 900 University Avenue, Riverside, CA 92521, USA
¹³ Laboratory for Multiwavelength Astrophysics, School of Physics and Astronomy, Rochester Institute of Technology, 84 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623, USA
¹⁴ Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Dr., Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
¹⁵ Department of Space, Earth and Environment, Chalmers University of Technology, SE-412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden
¹⁶ Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91001, USA
¹⁷ Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA
¹⁸ Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Jagtvej 128, DK-2200 Copenhagen, Denmark
¹⁹ University of Geneva, 24 rue du Général-Dufour, 1211 Genève 4, Switzerland
²⁰ University of Bologna, Department of Physics and Astronomy “Augusto Righi” (DIFA), Via Gobetti 93/2, I-40129 Bologna, Italy
²¹ INAF – Osservatorio di Astrofisica e Scienza dello Spazio, Via Gobetti 93/3, I-40129 Bologna, Italy
²² Zentrum für Astronomie, Universität Heidelberg, Philosophenweg 12, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany
²³ School of Astronomy and Space Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210093, China
²⁴ Key Laboratory of Modern Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nanjing University, Ministry of Education, Nanjing 210093, China
²⁵ Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (WPI), The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8583, Japan

^★ Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Received: 25 February 2026
Accepted: 29 May 2026

Abstract

Cosmological simulations suggest that various galaxy properties depend on their location within the cosmic web. Yet direct observational evidence of the dependence of star formation activity on distance to filaments remains scarce and is missing at z ≳ 1. We investigate how starburst, main-sequence (MS), and quenched galaxies are distributed with respect to cosmic web filaments and how this distribution evolves with redshift. We first used the SIMBA cosmological hydrodynamical simulation to predict the redshift evolution of the mean distance to the closest filament from z = 3 to z = 0 for different galaxy populations, after removing stellar-mass dependencies. We then measured the corresponding signal in the COSMOS field, using COSMOS2020 and COSMOS-Web data, where accurate photometric redshifts enable a reconstruction of the projected cosmic web from z = 2 to z = 0.5, and starbursts were identified through far-infrared spectral energy distribution fitting. In agreement with the results from SIMBA, starburst galaxies are found closer to filaments at z > 1 and at larger distances at z < 1, MS galaxies occupy intermediate environments with little evolution, and quenched galaxies show progressively shorter distances to filaments towards low redshift, with a crossing between starburst and MS populations around z ∼ 1. In COSMOS-Web, the relative evolution in the average distance to filaments between starburst and MS galaxies is detected at a significance level of at least 5σ. We show that a minimal toy model in which the only environmental ingredient is the specific star formation rate-filament distance modulation measured in simulations is sufficient to reproduce the observed differential evolution of the average filament distance between starburst and MS galaxies. These results show evidence for a link between the large-scale environment and the star formation activity of galaxies, as predicted by simulations, from z = 2 down to z = 0.5.