Galaxy Clustering and Merging

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics

Scientific paper

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Galaxies: Clusters: General, Gravitational Lensing: Strong, Galaxies: Interactions, Gravitational Waves

Scientific paper

Cosmic structure formation and galaxy evolution are important subjects in astrophysics. The thesis consists of two parts: (1) identification of galaxy clusters and studies of their properties; (2) identification of the mergers of luminous early-type galaxies and gravitational waves (GWs).
Most of the galaxy clusters in the previous catalogs have redshifts z≤0.3 with richnesses not well determined. Using the photometric redshifts of galaxies from the Sixth Data Release of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS DR6), we identify 39716 clusters in the redshift range of 0.05< z <0.6. This is the largest cluster catalog to date and goes to a deeper region than any previous catalogs from the SDSS. Using the SDSS spectroscopic redshifts, we find that the cluster redshifts are estimated accurately with an uncertainty of less than 0.022, the contamination rate and the completeness of member galaxies are found to be ˜20% and ∼90%, respectively. Monte Carlo simulations show that the cluster detection rate is larger than 90% for the massive (M_{200}>2×10^{14} M_{&sun;}) clusters with z≤0.42. The false detection rate is ˜5%. We obtain the richness, the summed luminosity and the gross galaxy number. They are tightly correlated with the X-ray luminosity and the temperature of clusters. The cluster mass is also found to be tightly related to the richness and summed luminosity in the form of M_{200}∝ R^{1.90±0.04} and M_{200}∝ L_r^{1.64±0.03}, respectively. In addition, 790 new candidates of X-ray clusters are found by cross-identification of our clusters with the unidentified source list of the ROSAT X-ray survey.
By visual inspections of the detected clusters, we recognize 13 gravitational lensing candidates. Among all the candidates, four can be sure strong lensing systems even without further spectroscopic identification, five are more probable and four are possible lenses.
In the second part, we discuss the merger rates of luminous early-type galaxies and GWs from the mergers of supermassive black holes (SMBHs). The merger rates of massive galaxies in the local universe are still not clear so far. We select a large sample (1209) of close pairs of galaxies with projected separations 7 kpc

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