No Arabic abstract
As the largest, clearly defined building blocks of our Universe, galaxy clusters are interesting astrophysical laboratories and important probes for cosmology. X-ray surveys for galaxy clusters provide one of the best ways to characterise the population of galaxy clusters. We provide a description of the construction of the NORAS II galaxy cluster survey based on X-ray data from the northern part of the ROSAT All-Sky Survey. NORAS II extends the NORAS survey down to a flux limit of 1.8 x 10^(-12) erg s^-1 cm^-2 (0.1 - 2.4 keV) increasing the sample size by about a factor of two. The NORAS II cluster survey now reaches the same quality and depth of its counterpart, the Southern REFLEX II survey, allowing us to combine the two complementary surveys. The paper provides information on the determination of the cluster X-ray parameters, the identification process of the X-ray sources, the statistics of the survey, and the construction of the survey selection function, which we provide in numerical format. Currently NORAS II contains 860 clusters with a median redshift of z = 0.102. We provide a number of statistical functions including the logN-logS and the X-ray luminosity function and compare these to the results from the complementary REFLEX II survey. Using the NORAS II sample to constrain the cosmological parameters, sigma_8 and Omega_m, yields results perfectly consistent with those of REFLEX II. Overall, the results show that the two hemisphere samples, NORAS II and REFLEX II, can be combined without problems to an all-sky sample, just excluding the Zone-of-Avoidance.
In the construction of an X-ray selected sample of galaxy clusters for cosmological studies, we have assembled a sample of 495 X-ray sources found to show extended X-ray emission in the first processing of the ROSAT All-Sky Survey. The sample covers the celestial region with declination $delta ge 0deg $ and galactic latitude $|b_{II}| ge 20deg $ and comprises sources with a count rate $ge 0.06$ counts s$^{-1}$ and a source extent likelihood of 7. In an optical follow-up identification program we find 378 (76%) of these sources to be clusters of galaxies. ...
Aimed at understanding the evolution of galaxies in clusters, the GLACE survey is mapping a set of optical lines ([OII]3727, [OIII]5007, Hbeta and Halpha/[NII] when possible) in several galaxy clusters at redshift around 0.40, 0.63 and 0.86, using the Tuneable Filters (TF) of the OSIRIS instrument (Cepa et al. 2005) at the 10.4m GTC telescope. This study will address key questions about the physical processes acting upon the infalling galaxies during the course of hierarchical growth of clusters. GLACE is already ongoing: we present some preliminary results on our observations of the galaxy cluster Cl0024+1654 at z = 0.395; on the other hand,
[email protected] has been approved as ESO/GTC large project to be started in 2011.
The mass function of galaxy clusters is a sensitive tracer of the gravitational evolution of the cosmic large-scale structure and serves as an important census of the fraction of matter bound in large structures. We obtain the mass function by fitting the observed cluster X-ray luminosity distribution from the REFLEX galaxy cluster survey to models of cosmological structure formation. We marginalise over uncertainties in the cosmological parameters as well as those of the relevant galaxy cluster scaling relations. The mass function is determined with an uncertainty less than 10% in the mass range 3 x 10^12 to 5 x 10^14 M$_odot$. For the cumulative mass function we find a slope at the low mass end consistent with a value of -1, while the mass rich end cut-off is milder than a Schechter function with an exponential term exp($- M^delta$) with $delta$ smaller than 1. Changing the Hubble parameter in the range $H_0 = 67 - 73 km s^-1 Mpc^{-1}$ or allowing the total neutrino mass to have a value between 0 - 0.4 eV causes variations less than the uncertainties. We estimate the fraction of mass locked up in galaxy clusters: about 4.4% of the matter in the Universe is bound in clusters (inside $r_200$) with a mass larger than 10^14 M$_odot$ and 14% to clusters and groups with a mass larger than 10^13 M$_odot$ at the present Universe. We also discuss the evolution of the galaxy cluster population with redshift. Our results imply that there is hardly any clusters with a mass > 10^15 M$_odot$ above a redshift of z = 1.
We present a catalogue of X-ray selected galaxy clusters and groups as a first release of the 2XMMi/SDSS Galaxy Cluster Survey. The survey is a search for galaxy clusters detected serendipitously in observations with XMM-Newton in the footprint of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The main aims of the survey are to identify new X-ray galaxy clusters, investigate their X-ray scaling relations, identify distant cluster candidates and study the correlation of the X-ray and optical properties. In this paper we describe the basic strategy to identify and characterize the X-ray cluster candidates that currently comprise 1180 objects selected from the second XMM-Newton serendipitous source catalogue (2XMMi-DR3). Cross-correlation of the initial catalogue with recently published optically selected SDSS galaxy cluster catalogues yields photometric redshifts for 275 objects. Of these, 182 clusters have at least one member with a spectroscopic redshift from existing public data (SDSS-DR8). Here we present the X-ray properties of the first cluster sample which comprises 175 clusters, among which 139 objects are new X-ray discoveries while the others were previously known as X-ray sources. The first cluster sample from the survey covers a wide range of redshifts from 0.09 to 0.61, bolometric luminosities L_500 = 1.9 x 10^42 - 1.2 x 10^45 erg/s, and masses M_500 = 2.3 x 10^13 - 4.9 x 10^14 Msun. We extend the relation between the X-ray bolometric luminosity L_500 and the X-ray temperature towards significantly lower T and L and still find that the slope of the linear L-T relation is consistent with values published for high luminosities.
We describe the observations and resultant galaxy cluster catalog from the 2770 deg$^2$ SPTpol Extended Cluster Survey (SPT-ECS). Clusters are identified via the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect, and confirmed with a combination of archival and targeted follow-up data, making particular use of data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). With incomplete followup we have confirmed as clusters 244 of 266 candidates at a detection significance $xi ge 5$ and an additional 204 systems at $4<xi<5$. The confirmed sample has a median mass of $M_{500c} sim {4.4 times 10^{14} M_odot h_{70}^{-1}}$, a median redshift of $z=0.49$, and we have identified 44 strong gravitational lenses in the sample thus far. Radio data are used to characterize contamination to the SZ signal; the median contamination for confirmed clusters is predicted to be $sim$1% of the SZ signal at the $xi>4$ threshold, and $<4%$ of clusters have a predicted contamination $>10% $ of their measured SZ flux. We associate SZ-selected clusters, from both SPT-ECS and the SPT-SZ survey, with clusters from the DES redMaPPer sample, and find an offset distribution between the SZ center and central galaxy in general agreement with previous work, though with a larger fraction of clusters with significant offsets. Adopting a fixed Planck-like cosmology, we measure the optical richness-to-SZ-mass ($lambda-M$) relation and find it to be 28% shallower than that from a weak-lensing analysis of the DES data---a difference significant at the 4 $sigma$ level---with the relations intersecting at $lambda=60$ . The SPT-ECS cluster sample will be particularly useful for studying the evolution of massive clusters and, in combination with DES lensing observations and the SPT-SZ cluster sample, will be an important component of future cosmological analyses.