Impact of the large-scale cosmic web on the X-ray emitting circumgalactic medium

Abstract

The hot circumgalactic medium (CGM), probed by X-ray observations, plays a central role in understanding gas flows that drive a galaxy's evolution. While CGM properties have been widely studied, the influence of a galaxy's large-scale cosmic environment on the hot gas content remains less explored. We investigate how the large-scale cosmic web affects the X-ray surface brightness (XSB) profiles of galaxies in the context of cosmological simulations. We use our novel IllustrisTNG-based lightcone, spanning $0.03 \leq z \leq 0.3$, first developed in our previous work, and generate self-consistent mock X-ray observations, using intrinsic gas cell information. We apply the filament finder DisPerSE on the galaxy distributions to identify the cosmic filaments within the lightcone. We classify central galaxies into five distinct large-scale environment (LSE) categories: clusters and massive groups, cluster outskirts, filaments, filament-void transition regions, and voids/walls. We find that the X-ray surface brightness profiles (XSB) of central galaxies of dark matter halos in filaments with $M_{\rm 200m} >10^{12}\ M_\odot$ are X-ray brighter than those in voids and walls, with $20-45%$ deviations in the radial range of $\sim (0.3-0.5) R_{\rm 200m}$. We investigate the source of this enhancement and find that the filament galaxies show higher average gas densities, temperatures, and metallicities compared to voids/walls galaxies. Our results demonstrate that the impact of the large-scale cosmic environment is imprinted on the hot CGM's X-ray emission. Future theoretical work on studying the effect of assembly history, connectivity, and gas accretion on galaxies in filaments and voids would help to further our understanding of the impact of the environment on X-ray observations.