Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): Stellar mass growth of spiral galaxies
  in the cosmic web
  We look for correlated changes in stellar mass and star formation rate along
filaments in the cosmic web by examining the stellar masses and UV-derived star
formation rates (SFR) of 1,799 ungrouped and unpaired spiral galaxies that
reside in filaments. We devise multiple distance metrics to characterise the
complex geometry of filaments, and find that galaxies closer to the cylindrical
centre of a filament have higher stellar masses than their counterparts near
the periphery of filaments, on the edges of voids. In addition, these
peripheral spiral galaxies have higher specific star formation rates (SSFR) at
a given mass. Complementing our sample of filament spiral galaxies with spiral
galaxies in tendrils and voids, we find that the average SFR of these objects
in different large scale environments are similar to each other with the
primary discriminant in SFR being stellar mass, in line with previous works.
However, the distributions of SFRs are found to vary with large-scale
environment. Our results thus suggest a model in which in addition to stellar
mass as the primary discriminant, the large-scale environment is imprinted in
the SFR as a second order effect. Furthermore, our detailed results for
filament galaxies suggest a model in which gas accretion from voids onto
filaments is primarily in an orthogonal direction. Overall, we find our results
to be in line with theoretical expectations of the thermodynamic properties of
the intergalactic medium in different large-scale environments.
