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Weak-lensing detection of intracluster filaments in the Coma cluster

Nature Astronomy volume 8, pages 377–383 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

The concordance cosmological model predicts that galaxy clusters grow at the intersection of filaments that structure the cosmic web and extend tens of megaparsecs. Although this hypothesis has been supported by the baryonic components, no observational study has detected the dark matter component of the intracluster filaments (ICFs), the terminal segment of the large-scale cosmic filaments at their conjunction with individual clusters. We report weak-lensing detection of ICFs in the Coma cluster field from the ∼12-deg2 Hyper Suprime-Cam imaging data. The detection is based on two methods, the matched-filter technique and the shear-peak statistic. The matched-filter technique yields detection significances of 6.6σ and 3.6σ for the northern and western ICFs at 110° and 340°, respectively. The shear-peak statistic yields detection significances of 3.1σ and 2.8σ for these ICFs. Both ICFs are highly correlated with the overdensities in the weak-lensing mass reconstruction and are well aligned with the known large-scale (>10 Mpc) cosmic filaments associated with the Coma supercluster.

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Fig. 1: Mass reconstruction and matched-filter statistic of the Coma cluster.
Fig. 2: Intracluster filament detection based on shear-peak statistic.
Fig. 3: Posterior distributions of the filament model parameters estimated from the Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling.
Fig. 4: Alignment of the ICFs with the large-scale filaments.

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Data availability

The raw Subaru HSC imaging data used for the current study are publicly available. The processed mosaic images and data points in the article figures are available on request from the authors. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

Our custom data processing codes are available on request from the authors.

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Acknowledgements

M.J.J. acknowledges support for the current research from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea under the programmes 2022R1A2C1003130 and RS-2023-00219959.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Astronomy, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea

    Kim HyeongHan, M. James Jee, Sangjun Cha & Hyejeon Cho

  2. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    M. James Jee

  3. Center for Galaxy Evolution Research, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea

    Hyejeon Cho

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  1. Kim HyeongHan
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Contributions

K.H. reduced the data, measured WL signals and filaments and wrote the manuscript. M.J.J. designed the research, created the reduction pipeline, coded the filament detection filter and wrote the manuscript. S.C. provided the mass reconstruction based on a convolutional neural network. H.C. identified the filaments based on the Coma galaxy distribution.

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Correspondence to M. James Jee.

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Nature Astronomy thanks Smriti Mahajan and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 WL S/N per physical area variation with the lens redshift.

Red solid line is the lensing efficiency β. Blue solid line is the WL S/N per physical area (λ) normalized by the value at \(z=0.5\). While the lensing efficiency is reduced approximately two orders of magnitude as the lens redshift decreases from z = 0.5 to the Coma redshift (z = 0.023\()\), the net WL S/N per physical area at the lens redshift increases approximately by a factor of three. This net gain is due to the combined effect of the higher score density \(n\) and lower LSS noise \({\sigma }_{{LSS}}\) per physical area at the Coma redshift. Here we assume that the purity \(\eta\) is the same across the lens redshift. In fact, \(\eta\) is also expected to be higher at the Coma redshift because of the proximity.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 2 Matched-filter detection of the ICFs in the Coma cluster.

Black (red) solid line represents the tangential (cross)-shear component. Dark shade indicates the shot noise (equation 5). Light shade includes both the shot noise and the noise due to the LSS effect. Three ICFs (N, SE and W) are detected with a significance level higher than 3\(\sigma\). The cross-component crosses zero at these locations.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 3 Matched-filter detection with a mock filament-cluster configuration.

Top Left: Mock convergence map with two filaments and an NFW halo displayed in log scale. Mock filaments are oriented at 10° and 70° with an NFW halo at the centre. The linear mass density of the filament mf = 1.2 × 1014 M☉Mpc−1 and the halo mass M200 = 8 × 1014 \({M}_{\odot }\) are motivated by our measurements in Coma. Whiskers show the resulting WL shear. Inner and outer yellow circles indicate r = 1 and 2.8 Mpc, respectively. Top Right: Black (red) solid line indicates the tangential (cross)-component \({\Gamma }_{+}({\Gamma }_{\times })\). The tangential-shear component is also shown in the left panel (black solid) in polar coordinates. Bottom: Same as the top panels except that another M200 = 8 × 1014 \({M}_{\odot }\) halo is placed (white arrow) at θ = 120°, ∼1.2 Mpc apart from the centre. The tangential component \({\Gamma }_{+}\) is sensitive to the filamentary mass structure and peaks at the correct angles. Although the off-centre halo gives rise to a small peak at θ = 120°, its height is much weaker than those arising from the real filamentary structures. Here we show the version that does not include intrinsic shape noise for illustration purposes. With the inclusion of the shape noise, the tangential-component peak due to the halo is below our detection threshold.

Source data

Extended Data Table 1 Physical Properties of the Intracluster Filaments
Full size table

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–3 and Table 1.

Supplementary Data 1

Source data for Supplementary Figs. 2 and 3 and Table 1.

Source data

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HyeongHan, K., Jee, M.J., Cha, S. et al. Weak-lensing detection of intracluster filaments in the Coma cluster. Nat Astron 8, 377–383 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-02164-w

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