The impact of cosmic filaments on starburst galaxies across cosmic times

Cosmological simulations suggest that various galaxy properties depend on their location within the cosmic web. Yet direct observational evidence of the dependence of star formation activity on distance to filaments remains scarce and is missing at z We investigate how starburst, main-sequence (MS), and quenched galaxies are distributed with respect to cosmic web filaments and how this distribution evolves with redshift. We first used the cosmological hydrodynamical simulation to predict the redshift evolution of the mean distance to the closest filament from z=3 to z=0 for different galaxy populations, after removing stellar-mass dependencies. We then measured the corresponding signal in the ̧osmos field, using ̧osmostwo and ̧osmosweb data, where accurate photometric redshifts enable a reconstruction of the projected cosmic web from z=2 to z=0.5, and starbursts were identified through far-infrared spectral energy distribution fitting. In agreement with the results from starburst galaxies are found closer to filaments at z>1 and at larger distances at z<1, MS galaxies occupy intermediate environments with little evolution, and quenched galaxies show progressively shorter distances to filaments towards low redshift, with a crossing between starburst and MS populations around z ∼ 1. In ̧osmosweb, the relative evolution in the average distance to filaments between starburst and MS galaxies is detected at a significance level of at least 5σ. We show that a minimal toy model in which the only environmental ingredient is the specific star formation rate-filament distance modulation measured in simulations is sufficient to reproduce the observed differential evolution of the average filament distance between starburst and MS galaxies. These results show evidence for a link between the large-scale environment and the star formation activity of galaxies, as predicted by simulations, from z=2 down to z=0.5.