Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2011-02-25
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
16 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS
Scientific paper
We present the analysis of the luminosity function of a large sample of galaxy clusters from the Northern Sky Optical Cluster Survey, using latest data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Our global luminosity function (down to M_r<= -16) does not show the presence of an upturn at faint magnitudes, while we do observe a strong dependence of its shape on both richness and cluster-centric radius, with a brightening of M^* and an increase of the dwarf to giant ratio with richness, indicating that more massive systems are more efficient in creating/retaining a population of dwarf satellites. This is observed both within physical (0.5 R_200) and fixed (0.5 Mpc) apertures, suggesting that the trend is either due to a global effect, operating at all scales, or to a local one but operating on even smaller scales. We further observe a decrease of the relative number of dwarf galaxies towards the cluster center; this is most probably due to tidal collisions or collisional disruption of the dwarfs since merging processes are inhibited by the high velocity dispersions in cluster cores and, furthermore, we do not observe a strong dependence of the bright end on the environment. We find indication that the dwarf to giant ratio decreases with increasing redshift, within 0.07
de Carvalho Reinaldo R.
de Filippis Elisabetta
Gal Roy R.
La Barbera Francesco
Longo Giuseppe
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