7 research outputs found
Discovery of Extreme Examples of Superclustering in Aquarius
We report the discovery of two highly extended filaments and one extremely
high density knot within the region of Aquarius. The supercluster candidates
were chosen via percolation analysis of the Abell and ACO catalogs and include
only the richest clusters (R >= 1). The region examined is a 10x45 degree strip
and is now 87% complete in cluster redshift measurements to mag_10 = 18.3. In
all, we report 737 galaxy redshifts in 46 cluster fields. One of the
superclusters, dubbed Aquarius, is comprised of 14 Abell/ACO clusters and
extends 110h^-1Mpc in length only 7 degrees off the line-of-sight. On the
near-end of the Aquarius filament, another supercluster, dubbed Aquarius-Cetus,
extends for 75h^-1Mpc perpendicular to the line-of-sight. After fitting
ellipsoids to both Aquarius and Aquarius-Cetus, we find axis ratios (long-to-
midlength axis) of 4.3 for Aquarius and 3.0 for Aquarius-Cetus. We fit
ellipsoids to all N>=5 clumps of clusters in the Abell/ACO measured-z cluster
sample. The frequency of filaments with axis ratios >=3.0 (~20%) is nearly
identical with that found among `superclusters' in Monte Carlo simulations of
random and random- clumped clusters, however, so the rich Abell/ACO clusters
have no particular tendency toward filamentation. The Aquarius filament also
contains a `knot' of 6 clusters at Z ~0.11, with five of the clusters near
enough togeteher to represent an apparent overdensity of 150. There are
three other R >= 1 cluster density enhancements similar to this knot at lower
redshifts: Corona Borealis, the Shapely Concentration, and another grouping of
seven clusters in Microscopium. All four of these dense superclusters appear
near the point of breaking away from the Hubble Flow, and some may now be in
collapse, but there is little evidence of any being virialized.Comment: 45 pages (+ e-tables), 7 figures, AASTeX Accepted for Publication in
Ap
Loose Groups of Galaxies in the Las Campanas Redshift Survey
A ``friends-of-friends'' percolation algorithm has been used to extract a
catalogue of dn/n = 80 density enhancements (groups) from the six slices of the
Las Campanas Redshift Survey (LCRS). The full catalogue contains 1495 groups
and includes 35% of the LCRS galaxy sample. A clean sample of 394 groups has
been derived by culling groups from the full sample which either are too close
to a slice edge, have a crossing time greater than a Hubble time, have a
corrected velocity dispersion of zero, or contain a 55-arcsec ``orphan'' (a
galaxy with a mock redshift which was excluded from the original LCRS redshift
catalogue due to its proximity to another galaxy -- i.e., within 55 arcsec).
Median properties derived from the clean sample include: line-of-sight velocity
dispersion sigma_los = 164km/s, crossing time t_cr = 0.10/H_0, harmonic radius
R_h = 0.58/h Mpc, pairwise separation R_p = 0.64/h Mpc, virial mass M_vir =
(1.90x10^13)/h M_sun, total group R-band luminosity L_tot = (1.30x10^11)/h^2
L_sun, and R-band mass-to-light ratio M/L = 171h M_sun/L_sun; the median number
of observed members in a group is 3.Comment: 32 pages of text, 27 figures, 7 tables. Figures 1, 4, 6, 7, and 8 are
in gif format. Tables 1 and 3 are in plain ASCII format (in paper source) and
are also available at http://www-sdss.fnal.gov:8000/~dtucker/LCLG . Accepted
for publication in the September 2000 issue of ApJ
The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey: The alpha.40 HI Source Catalog, its Characteristics and their Impact on the Derivation of the HI Mass Function
We present a current catalog of 21 cm HI line sources extracted from the
Arecibo Legacy Fast Arecibo L-band Feed Array (ALFALFA) survey over ~2800
square degrees of sky: the alpha.40 catalog. Covering 40% of the final survey
area, the alpha.40 catalog contains 15855 sources in the regions 07h30m < R.A.
< 16h30m, +04 deg < Dec. < +16 deg and +24 deg < Dec. < +28 deg and 22h < R.A.
< 03h, +14 deg < Dec. < +16 deg and +24 deg < Dec. < +32 deg. Of those, 15041
are certainly extragalactic, yielding a source density of 5.3 galaxies per
square degree, a factor of 29 improvement over the catalog extracted from the
HI Parkes All Sky Survey. In addition to the source centroid positions, HI line
flux densities, recessional velocities and line widths, the catalog includes
the coordinates of the most probable optical counterpart of each HI line
detection, and a separate compilation provides a crossmatch to identifications
given in the photometric and spectroscopic catalogs associated with the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7. Fewer than 2% of the extragalactic HI line
sources cannot be identified with a feasible optical counterpart; some of those
may be rare OH megamasers at 0.16 < z < 0.25. A detailed analysis is presented
of the completeness, width dependent sensitivity function and bias inherent in
the current alpha.40 catalog. The impact of survey selection, distance errors,
current volume coverage and local large scale structure on the derivation of
the HI mass function is assessed. While alpha.40 does not yet provide a
completely representative sampling of cosmological volume, derivations of the
HI mass function using future data releases from ALFALFA will further improve
both statistical and systematic uncertainties.Comment: 62 pages, 28 figures. See http://egg.astro.cornell.edu/alfalfa/data
for ASCII and CSV datafiles corresponding to Tables 1, 2 and 3. A higher
resolution PDF version can be found at
http://egg.astro.cornell.edu/alfalfa/pubs.php. To appear in Nov 2011 Astron.