The Effect of Cosmic Web Filaments on Galaxy Properties in the RESOLVE and ECO Surveys

Galaxy environment plays an important role in driving the transformation ofgalaxies from blue and star-forming to red and quenched. Recent works havefocused on the role of cosmic web filaments in galaxy evolution and havesuggested that stellar mass segregation, quenching of star formation andgas-stripping may occur within filaments. We study the relationship betweendistance to filament and the stellar mass, colour and HI gas content ofgalaxies using data from the REsolved Spectroscopy of a Local VolumE (RESOLVE)survey and Environmental COntext (ECO) catalogue, two overlapping census-style,volume-complete surveys. We use the Discrete Persistence Structures Extractor(DisPerSE) to identify cosmic web filaments over the full ECO area. We findthat galaxies close to filaments have higher stellar masses, in agreement withprevious results. Controlling for stellar mass, we find that galaxies also haveredder colours and are more gas poor closer to filaments. When accounting forgroup membership and halo mass, we find that these trends in colour and gascontent are dominated by the increasing prevalence of galaxy group environmentsclose to filaments, particularly for high halo mass and low stellar massgalaxies. Filaments have an additional small effect on the gas content ofgalaxies in low-mass haloes, possibly due to cosmic web stripping.