Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jul 1996
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996apj...466...92d&link_type=abstract
Astrophysical Journal v.466, p.92
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
30
Cosmology: Observations, Galaxies: Clusters: General, Galaxies: Photometry
Scientific paper
At large redshifts, a cluster or group may be too distant for the galaxies within the cluster to be detected individually in a short exposure. However, the light from these "undetected" galaxies still modulates the surface brightness of the background sky. Distant clusters can appear as 10"-11.5' sized fluctuations in the surface brightness of the extragalactic background light (EBL). The fluctuations have central surface brightnesses fainter than roughly 26 mag arcsec^-2^ (in V) for clusters with z >~ 1 and are brighter than the random fluctuations produced by field galaxies on comparable angular scales. While such low surface brightnesses features are difficult to detect with direct high- resolution imaging, we demonstrate that they are easily reached in short exposures through smoothing the sky in very flat CCD images. For a reasonable extrapolation of the properties and space densities of clusters and groups and for a wide range of cosmological assumptions, we find that there should be tens of high-redshift clusters per square degree visible in the optical extragalactic background. Therefore, searching for small bright fluctuations in the EBL could be an efficient method for identifying high-redshift cluster candidates. The detection rate is sensitive to the rate of cluster and galaxy evolution and may vary between 1 and 100 clusters per square degree. With follow-up imaging and spectroscopy of the cluster candidates, one can constrain both galaxy luminosity evolution and cluster mass evolution, and potentially discriminate between different cosmological models.
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