English

Tracing Missing Baryons in the Cosmic Filaments with tSZ and CMB-Lensing Stacking

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2026-02-09 v2

Abstract

We investigate the distribution of missing baryons in the cosmic filaments by stacking 30,700\sim 30,700 filaments across the northern and southern SDSS sky regions using Planck Compton-yy and CMB lensing maps. Filaments are identified using the DisPerSE algorithm applied to the SDSS LOWZ-CMASS galaxy samples, selecting structures with lengths between 30-100 cMpc and redshifts in the range 0.2<z<0.60.2 < z < 0.6. Radial profiles are extracted out to 25 cMpc from the filament spines, and galaxy clusters with halo masses above 3×1013M\sim 3 \times 10^{13} M_\odot are masked to reduce contamination. We detect the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) signal at 7.82σ7.82\sigma and the CMB lensing signal at 7.78σ7.78\sigma. The stacked profiles are corrected by a geometric bias correction based on filament inclination with respect to the line-of-sight, and they are portrayed assuming isothermal, cylindrically symmetric models. We explore different gas and matter density distributions, focusing on the β\beta-models with (α,β)=(2,2/3)(\alpha,\beta) = (2,2/3) or (1,1)(1,1). By jointly fitting the Compton-yy and κ\kappa profiles, we constrain the central electron overdensity and temperature to be δ=4.181.06+2.01\delta = 4.18^{+2.01}_{-1.06} and Te=2.740.53+0.65×106KT_e = 2.74^{+0.65}_{-0.53}\times 10^6 \mathrm{K} for the standard β\beta-model. These results suggest that filamentary WHIM in our selected long filaments contributes a significant baryon fraction of 0.1270.021+0.019×Ωb0.127^{+0.019}_{-0.021}\times \Omega_b to the cosmic baryon budget.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.08561,
  title  = {Tracing Missing Baryons in the Cosmic Filaments with tSZ and CMB-Lensing Stacking},
  author = {Jianzhuo Li and Yi Zheng and Weishan Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.08561},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

31 pages, 15 figures, JCAP accepted. To address the potential impact of the Fingers-of-God (FoG) effect, an appendix is provided to evaluate its influence on filament properties and validate our main results