Speaker
Description
The existence of filaments connecting galaxies, within which galaxies form, has been a long-standing prediction of structure formation theories in a Universe dominated by cold dark matter. However, direct imaging of these filaments has remained elusive until the advent of large-format integral field spectrographs such as the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) at the Very Large Telescope.
In this talk, I will present recent direct detections of cosmic web filaments in Lyα emission from an ultra-deep (142-hour) observation in the MUSE Ultra Deep Field. This unique dataset enables us to directly probe the morphology, surface brightness profiles, and the transition radius between the circumgalactic and the intergalactic medium of different extended emitting structures spanning 3-5 cMpc. These filaments are observed both between a pair of bright quasars at redshift z~3.22 and within various overdensities of Lyα emitters between redshifts ~2.8 and ~4. I will also compare these findings with predictions from numerical simulations.
These discoveries represent a significant step forward in the study of large-scale structures in emission, providing a powerful new method to trace the distribution of dark matter and gas dynamics within the cosmic web.
| Parallel session | Astrophysical Probes of Dark Matter and Dark Energy |
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