A 15 Mpc rotating galaxy filament at redshift z = 0.032

Abstract

Understanding the cold atomic hydrogen gas (HI) within cosmic filaments has the potential to pin down the relationship between the low density gas in the cosmic web and how the galaxies that lie within it grow using this material. We report the discovery of a cosmic filament using 14 HI-selected galaxies that form a very thin elongated structure of 1.7 Mpc. These galaxies are embedded within a much larger cosmic web filament, traced by optical galaxies, that spans at least $\sim 15$~Mpc. We find that the spin axes of the HI galaxies are significantly more strongly aligned with the cosmic web filament ($\langle\lvert \cos \psi \rvert\rangle = 0.64 \pm 0.05$) than cosmological simulations predict, with the optically-selected galaxies showing alignment to a lesser degree ($\langle\lvert \cos \psi \rvert\rangle = 0.55 \pm 0.05$). This structure demonstrates that within the cosmic filament, the angular momentum of galaxies is closely connected to the large-scale filamentary structure. We also find strong evidence that the galaxies are orbiting around the spine of the filament, making this one of the largest rotating structures discovered thus far, and from which we can infer that there is transfer of angular momentum from the filament to the individual galaxies. The abundance of HI galaxies along the filament and the low dynamical temperature of the galaxies within the filament indicates that this filament is at an early evolutionary stage where the imprint of cosmic matter flow on galaxies has been preserved over cosmic time.