English

Galaxy subgroups in galaxy clusters

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2015-05-28 v2

Abstract

Galaxies which fall into clusters as part of the same infall halo can retain correlations due to their shared origin. N-body simulations are used to study properties of such galaxy subgroups within clusters, including their richnesses and prevalence. The sizes, densities and velocity dispersions of all subgroups with >= 8 galaxies are found and compared to those of the host clusters. The largest galaxy subgroup provides a preferred direction in the cluster and is compared to other preferred directions in the cluster. Scatter in cluster mass measurements (via five observables), along ~ 96 lines of sight, is compared to the relation of the line of sight to this preferred direction: scatter in cluster velocity dispersion measurements show the strongest correlation. The Dressler-Shectman test (Dressler & Shectman 1988), is applied to these clusters, to see whether the substructure it identifies is related to these subgroups. The results for any specific line of sight seem noisy; however, clusters with large subgroups tend to have a higher fraction of lines of sight where the test detects substructure.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1105.1397,
  title  = {Galaxy subgroups in galaxy clusters},
  author = {J. D. Cohn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1105.1397},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

12 pages, final version for publication with helpful comments from referee and others included

R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:03:57.961Z