No Arabic abstract
We study the relations between the multimodality of galaxy clusters drawn from the SDSS DR8 and the environment where they reside. As cluster environment we consider the global luminosity density field, supercluster membership, and supercluster morphology. We use 3D normal mixture modelling, the Dressler-Shectman test, and the peculiar velocity of cluster main galaxies as signatures of multimodality of clusters. We calculate the luminosity density field to study the environmental densities around clusters, and to find superclusters where clusters reside. We determine the morphology of superclusters with the Minkowski functionals and compare the properties of clusters in superclusters of different morphology. We apply principal component analysis to study the relations between the multimodality parametres of clusters and their environment simultaneously. We find that multimodal clusters reside in higher density environment than unimodal clusters. Clusters in superclusters have higher probability to have substructure than isolated clusters. The superclusters can be divided into two main morphological types, spiders and filaments. Clusters in superclusters of spider morphology have higher probabilities to have substructure and larger peculiar velocities of their main galaxies than clusters in superclusters of filament morphology. The most luminous clusters are located in the high-density cores of rich superclusters. Five of seven most luminous clusters, and five of seven most multimodal clusters reside in spider-type superclusters; four of seven most unimodal clusters reside in filament-type superclusters. Our study shows the importance of the role of superclusters as high density environment which affects the properties of galaxy systems in them.
We search for the presence of substructure, a non-Gaussian, asymmetrical velocity distribution of galaxies, and large peculiar velocities of the main galaxies in galaxy clusters with at least 50 member galaxies, drawn from the SDSS DR8. We employ a number of 3D, 2D, and 1D tests to analyse the distribution of galaxies in clusters: 3D normal mixture modelling, the Dressler-Shectman test, the Anderson-Darling and Shapiro-Wilk tests and others. We find the peculiar velocities of the main galaxies, and use principal component analysis to characterise our results. More than 80% of the clusters in our sample have substructure according to 3D normal mixture modelling, the Dressler-Shectman (DS) test shows substructure in about 70% of the clusters. The median value of the peculiar velocities of the main galaxies in clusters is 206 km/s (41% of the rms velocity). The velocities of galaxies in more than 20% of the clusters show significant non-Gaussianity. While multidimensional normal mixture modelling is more sensitive than the DS test in resolving substructure in the sky distribution of cluster galaxies, the DS test determines better substructure expressed as tails in the velocity distribution of galaxies. Richer, larger, and more luminous clusters have larger amount of substructure and larger (compared to the rms velocity) peculiar velocities of the main galaxies. Principal component analysis of both the substructure indicators and the physical parameters of clusters shows that galaxy clusters are complicated objects, the properties of which cannot be explained with a small number of parameters or delimited by one single test. The presence of substructure, the non-Gaussian velocity distributions, as well as the large peculiar velocities of the main galaxies, shows that most of the clusters in our sample are dynamically young.
Majority of all galaxies reside in groups of less than 50 member galaxies. These groups are distributed in various large-scale environments from voids to superclusters. Evolution of galaxies is affected by the environment in which they reside. Our aim is to study the effects that the local group scale and the supercluster scale environment have on galaxies. We use a luminosity-density field to determine density of the large-scale environment of galaxies in groups of various richness. We calculate fractions of different types of galaxies in groups with richnesses up to 50 member galaxies and in different large-scale environments from voids to superclusters. The fraction of passive elliptical galaxies rises and the fraction of star-forming spiral galaxies declines when the richness of a group of galaxies rises from two to approximately ten galaxies. On the large scale, the passive elliptical galaxies become more numerous than star-forming spirals when the environmental density grows to the density level typical for superclusters. The large-scale environment affects the level of these fractions in groups: galaxies in equally rich groups are more likely to be elliptical in supercluster environments than in lower densities. The crossing point, where the number of passive and star-forming galaxies is equal, happens in groups with lower richness in superclusters than in voids. Galaxies in low-density areas require richer groups to evolve from star-forming to passive. Groups in superclusters are on average more luminous than groups in large-scale environments with lower density. Our results suggest that the evolution of galaxies is affected by both, by the group in which the galaxy resides, and by its large-scale environment. Galaxies in lower-density regions develop later than galaxies in similar mass groups in high-density environments.
A review of the study of superclusters based on the 2dFGRS and SDSS is given. Real superclusters are compared with models using simulated galaxies of the Millennium Run. We show that the fraction of very luminous superclusters in real samples is about five times greater than in simulated samples. Superclusters are generated by large-scale density perturbations which evolve very slowly. The absence of very luminous superclusters in simulations can be explained either by non-proper treatment of large-scale perturbations, or by some yet unknown processes in the very early Universe.
We present a calibration of the fundamental plane using SDSS Data Release 8. We analysed about 93000 elliptical galaxies up to $z<0.2$, the largest sample used for the calibration of the fundamental plane so far. We incorporated up-to-date K-corrections and used GalaxyZoo data to classify the galaxies in our sample. We derived independent fundamental plane fits in all five Sloan filters u, g, r, i and z. A direct fit using a volume-weighted least-squares method was applied to obtain the coefficients of the fundamental plane, which implicitly corrects for the Malmquist bias. We achieved an accuracy of 15% for the fundamental plane as a distance indicator. We provide a detailed discussion on the calibrations and their influence on the resulting fits. These re-calibrated fundamental plane relations form a well-suited anchor for large-scale peculiar-velocity studies in the nearby universe. In addition to the fundamental plane, we discuss the redshift distribution of the elliptical galaxies and their global parameters.
We study the spatial distribution of loose groups from the Las Campanas Redshift Survey, comparing it with the supercluster-void network delineated by rich clusters of galaxies. We use density fields and the friends-of-friends algorithm to identify the members of superclusters of Abell clusters among the Las Campanas loose groups. We find that systems of loose groups tend to be oriented perpendicularly to the line-of-sight, and discuss possible reasons for that. We show that loose groups in richer systems (superclusters of Abell clusters) are themselves also richer and more massive than groups in systems without Abell clusters. Our results indicate that superclusters, as high density environments, have a major role in the formation and evolution of galaxy systems.