Galaxies in the simulated cosmic web: I. Filament identification and their properties

Abstract: As the environment harbouring the majority of galaxies, filaments are thought to play a key role in the co-evolution of galaxies and the cosmic web. In this first part of a series to understand the link between galaxies and filaments through cosmological simulations, we address two major current obstacles on this path: the difficulty of meaningful filament identification, and their poorly constrained properties and internal structure. We use the public EAGLE and TNG100 simulations to build physically motivated filament catalogues with the DisPerSE algorithm, based on the dark matter (DM) field at redshift z = 0 and z = 2, explicitly accounting for the multi-scale nature of filaments and with careful validation of results. Filament widths, lengths, and densities vary by factors ~5-100 in both simulations, highlighting the heterogeneous nature of filaments as a cosmic environment. All filaments are relatively thin, with overdensity profiles of galaxies, DM, and gas dropping to the cosmic mean within <3 Mpc from their spines. Contrary to groups and clusters, filament cores are highly substructure dominated, by as much as ~80 per cent. Filament gas maps reveal rich temperature and density structures that limit the applicability of simple cylindrically symmetric models. EAGLE and TNG100 agree that z = 2 filament spines are traced by overdense cool gas in pressure equilibrium with a >10x hotter envelope. However, significant differences in detail between their predicted gas property maps imply that individual simulations cannot yet describe the baryon structure of filaments with certainty. Finally, we compare our fiducial filament network to one constructed from galaxies. The two differ in many aspects, but the distance of a galaxy to its nearest galaxy-based filament still serves as a statistical proxy for its true environment.