The impact of cosmic filaments on starburst galaxies across cosmic times
Journal article, 2026
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 greater than or similar to 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 similar to 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 5 sigma. 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.
large-scale structure of Universe
galaxies: statistics
galaxies: evolution
Author
Baptiste Jego
University of Strasbourg
Matthieu Bethermin
University of Strasbourg
Katarina Kraljic
University of Strasbourg
Clotilde Laigle
Sorbonne University
Lingyu Wang
Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON)
University of Groningen
Antonio La Marca
Leiden University
European Space Agency (ESA)
Olivier Ilbert
Aix Marseille University
Hollis B. Akins
University of Texas
Caitlin M. Casey
University of Copenhagen
University of California
Gavin Leroy
Durham University
Ali Hadi
University of California
Jeyhan S. Kartaltepe
Rochester Institute of Technology
Anton M. Koekemoer
Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)
Henry Joy McCracken
Sorbonne University
Louise Paquereau
Chalmers, Space, Earth and Environment, Astronomy and Plasmaphysics
Jason Rhodes
California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
Brant E. Robertson
University of California
Marko Shuntov
University of Copenhagen
University of Geneva
Greta Toni
Istituto nazionale di astrofisica (INAF)
University of Bologna
Heidelberg University
Can Xu
Nanjing University
University of Tokyo
Astronomy and Astrophysics
0004-6361 (ISSN) 1432-0746 (eISSN)
Vol. 711 A303Subject Categories (SSIF 2025)
Astronomy, Astrophysics, and Cosmology
DOI
10.1051/0004-6361/202659601