English

Testing for substructure in optical and X-ray clusters

Astrophysics 2007-05-23 v1

Abstract

We present a detailed study of the morphological features of 22 rich galaxy clusters. We systematically compare cluster images and morphological parameters in an attempt to reliably identify possible substructure in both optical and X-ray images. To this end, we compute moments of the surface-brightness distribution to estimate ellipticities, center-of-mass shifts and orientations. We find important correlations between the optical and X-ray morphological shape parameters. Most of our clusters (17) have a good 1-to-1 correspondence between the optical and the X-ray images and at least 9 appear to have strong indications of substructure. This corresponds to a percentage of about 40% in good accordance with other similar analyses. Finally, 4 out of 22 systems seem to have distinct subclumps in the optical which are not verified in the X-ray images, and thus are suspect of being due to optical projection effects. We assess the significance of results using Monte Carlo simulations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0001184,
  title  = {Testing for substructure in optical and X-ray clusters},
  author = {Vaggelis Kolokotronis and Spyros Basilakos and Manolis Plionis and Ioannis Georgantopoulos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0001184},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

To be published in the proceedings of the "Large-Scale Structure in the X-ray Universe" meeting, Santorini 1999