How dark are filaments in the cosmic web?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The cold dark matter model predicts that dark matter haloes are connected by filaments. Direct measurements of the masses and structure of these filaments are difficult, but recently several studies have detected these dark-matter-dominated filaments using weak lensing. Here we study the efficiency of galaxy formation within the filaments by measuring their total mass-to-light ratios and stellar mass fractions. Specifically, we stack pairs of luminous red galaxies (LRGs) with a typical separation on the sky of 8 h−1 Mpc. We stack background galaxy shapes around pairs to obtain mass maps through weak lensing, and we stack galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to obtain maps of light and stellar mass. To isolate the signal from the filament, we construct two matched catalogues of physical and non-physical (projected) LRG pairs, with the same distributions of redshift and separation. We then subtract the two stacked maps. Using LRG pair samples from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey at two different redshifts, we find that the evolution of the mass in filament is consistent with the predictions from perturbation theory. The filaments are not entirely dark: Their mass-to-light ratios (M/L = 351 ± 137 in solar units in the rband) and stellar mass fractions (Mstellar/M = 0.0073 ± 0.0030) are consistent with the cosmic values (and with their redshift evolutions).