Evolution of cosmic filaments in the MTNG simulation

Abstract

We present a study of the evolution of cosmic filaments across redshift with an emphasis on some important properties: filament lengths, growth rates, and radial profiles of galaxy densities. Following an observation-driven approach, we built cosmic filament catalogues at z = 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 from the galaxy distributions of the large hydro-dynamical run of the MilleniumTNG project. We employed the extensively used DisPerSE cosmic web finder code, for which we provide a user-friendly guide, including the details of a physics-driven calibration procedure, with the hope of helping future users. We performed the first statistical measurements of the evolution of connectivity in a large-scale simulation, finding that the connectivity of cosmic nodes (defined as the number of filaments attached) globally decreases from early to late times. The study of cosmic filaments in proper coordinates reveals that filaments grow in length and radial extent, as expected from large-scale structures in an expanding Universe. But the most interesting results arise once the Hubble flow is factored out. We find remarkably stable comoving filament length functions and over-density profiles, showing only little evolution of the total population of filaments in the past ∼12.25 Gyr. However, by tracking the spatial evolution of individual structures, we demonstrate that filaments of different lengths actually follow different evolutionary paths. While short filaments preferentially contract, long filaments expand along their longitudinal direction with growth rates that are the highest in the early, matter-dominated Universe. Filament diversity at a fixed redshift is also shown by the different (∼5σ) density values between the shortest and longest filaments. Our results hint that cosmic filaments can be used as additional probes for dark energy, but further theoretical work is still needed.