Evolution of submillimeter galaxies across cosmic-web environments
Abstract
Submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) provide valuable insights into galaxy formation and evolution and are likely influenced by their cosmic environment. However, their rarity makes environmental trends difficult to establish. We use the FLAMINGO simulation, which simultaneously reproduces the redshift distribution and number counts of SMGs. We use the DisPerSE to identify filamentary structures at , 3, 2, 1.5, and 1. We define inner cluster-halo, outer cluster-halo, inner filament, outer filament, and void/wall environments at each redshift considering mass evolution of cluster-halos and density evolution of filaments. For a fixed stellar-mass cut of M, the fraction of SMGs in the inner cluster-halo environment declines from at to by , and similar trends are observed in other environments. The abundance of SMGs within a cluster-halo increases with halo mass, mirroring the increase in the total galaxy population. Consequently, the ratio of SMG halo occupation to that of all galaxies is largely insensitive to halo mass, but varies with redshift. In contrast, the ratio of the halo occupation of non-SMGs to that of all galaxies declines with halo mass and shows little redshift evolution. We show that the central and satellite SMGs form two distinct populations in inner cluster-halos. SMGs occupy the metal-rich side of the metallicity distribution, but rarely attain the highest metallicities because ongoing enrichment is limited by gas depletion. The brightest SMGs (S mJy) are found exclusively in inner cluster-halos, highlighting a strong connection between SMG luminosity and environmental density. Our results show that SMGs dominate star formation in dense environments, contributing up to of the SFR in inner cluster-halos at , but less than in low-density regions.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.11751,
title = {Evolution of submillimeter galaxies across cosmic-web environments},
author = {Ankit Kumar and M. Celeste Artale and Antonio D. Montero-Dorta and Lucia Guaita and Joop Schaye and Kyoung-Soo Lee and Alexandra Pope and Facundo Rodriguez and Eric Gawiser and Ho Seong Hwang and Paulina Troncoso Iribarren and Jaehyun Lee and Seong-Kook Lee and Changbom Park and Yujin Yang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.11751},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
13 pages, 6 figures, submitted to A&A [abstract reduced to meet arXiv character limit]