Cosmic filaments in galaxy cluster outskirts: quantifying finding filaments in redshift space

Abstract

ABSTRACT Inferring line-of-sight distances from redshifts in and around galaxy clusters is complicated by peculiar velocities, a phenomenon known as the ‘Fingers of God’ (FoG). This presents a significant challenge for finding filaments in large observational data sets as these artificial elongations can be wrongly identified as cosmic web filaments by extraction algorithms. Upcoming targeted wide-field spectroscopic surveys of galaxy clusters and their infall regions, such as the WEAVE Wide-Field Cluster Survey, motivate our investigation of the impact of FoG on finding filaments connected to clusters. Using zoom-in resimulations of 324 massive galaxy clusters and their outskirts from the three hundred project, we test methods typically applied to large-scale spectroscopic data sets. This paper describes our investigation of whether a statistical compression of the FoG of cluster centres and galaxy groups can lead to correct filament extractions in the cluster outskirts. We find that within 5R200 (∼15 h−1 Mpc) statistically correcting for FoG elongations of virialized regions does not achieve reliable filament networks compared to reference filament networks based on true positions. This is due to the complex flowing motions of galaxies towards filaments in addition to the cluster infall, which overwhelm the signal of the filaments relative to the volume that we probe. While information from spectroscopic redshifts is still important to isolate the cluster regions, and thereby reduce background and foreground interlopers, we expect future spectroscopic surveys of galaxy cluster outskirts to rely on 2D positions of galaxies to extract cosmic filaments.