Do Submillimeter Galaxies Trace Megaparsec Large-scale Structures? -- An Overdensity Analysis of 449 Submillimeter Galaxies in COSMOS

Abstract

We present an environmental analysis and overdensity catalog for a large sample of submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) in the COSMOS field in order to understand whether SMGs are signposts of megaparsec-scale overdensity structures. We apply the Poisson Probability Method (PPM) protocluster finder to characterize the significance ($σ$) and overdensity value ($δ$) of any overdense structures surrounding specific 'beacon' galaxies. These beacons include 449 SMGs from A3COSMOS (including 168 with spectroscopic redshifts, 52 of which have CO or [CII] 158$μ$m line detections), as well as a control sample of over 5000 main-sequence star-forming galaxies (SFGs) selected from the 40-band photometric-redshift catalog in COSMOS2025. We successfully reproduce 15 known protoclusters and clusters in COSMOS (including Hyperion large-scale structure, CL J1001+0220 at z~2.5, and AzTEC-3 protocluster at z~5.3), and report 26 new PPM-based high-overdensity ($δ$ $\geq$ 5), high-significance ($σ$ $\geq$ 5), robust candidates. We measure an overdensity fraction of 11.5-71.2% (1.3-61.0%) in the CO/[CII] 52 SMG (full 449 SMG) sample with different criterion categories, confirming that SMGs are signposts of overdensities compared to the control SFG sample. We also notice that the fraction is lower than 100%, indicating that not all SMGs are associated with overdensities. We thus inspect the JWST morphology and argue that the triggering of starburst in SMGs must have non-environmental mechanisms, for instance, merger and violent disk instability. Finally, we further conduct a spatial distribution analysis, finding that the location of SMGs in overdensities has a redshift evolution, with SMGs being more concentrated in the inner regions of overdensities at higher redshift.