Mass, Light, and Galaxy Number in Nearby Clusters

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

Galaxy clusters are excellent laboratories for studying the relation between galaxies and dark matter halos. We use 39 galaxy clusters from the Cluster Infall Regions in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (CIRS) project to study the halo occupation distribution, measure mass to light ratios, and calculate mass to light profiles. These results will help us understand how galaxies populate dark matter halos and determine how star formation efficiency depends on environment. We use redshifts obtained from the Fourth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), and new redshifts obtained at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO) and couple them with photometric data from the SDSS to create clean galaxy catalogs for this study. Using this sample, we find that the mean number of galaxies (brighter than M*r + 1) populating a dark matter halo scales as N∝M0.65±0.06. This result indicates that low-mass clusters have more galaxies per unit mass than high-mass clusters. Similarly, the total light of bright member galaxies scales as L ∝ M0.59±0.06. This result suggests that the luminosity functions of low-mass and high-mass clusters are very similar at the bright end. These results generally agree with previous cluster studies that used different techniques for identifying members and for estimating masses. Finally, we present the mass-to-light profiles of each cluster. These profiles are generally flat at large radius, suggesting that the efficiency of star formation depends only weakly on environment.

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