Tracing Missing Baryons in the Cosmic Filaments with tSZ and CMB-Lensing Stacking
Abstract
We investigate the distribution of missing baryons in the cosmic filaments by stacking filaments across the northern and southern SDSS sky regions using Planck Compton- 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 . Radial profiles are extracted out to 25 cMpc from the filament spines, and galaxy clusters with halo masses above are masked to reduce contamination. We detect the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) signal at and the CMB lensing signal at . 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 -models with or . By jointly fitting the Compton- and profiles, we constrain the central electron overdensity and temperature to be and for the standard -model. These results suggest that filamentary WHIM in our selected long filaments contributes a significant baryon fraction of 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