Identification of members in the central and outer regions of galaxy clusters. (arXiv:1211.3669v1 [astro-ph.CO])

Identification of members in the central and outer regions of galaxy clusters. (arXiv:1211.3669v1 [astro-ph.CO]):
The caustic technique measures the mass of galaxy clusters in both their
virial and infall regions and, as a byproduct, yields the list of cluster
galaxy members. Here we use 100 galaxy clusters with mass M200>=1E14 Msun/h
extracted from a cosmological N-body simulation of a LambdaCDM universe to test
the ability of the caustic technique to identify the cluster galaxy members. We
identify the true three-dimensional members as the gravitationally bound
galaxies. The caustic technique uses the caustic location in the redshift
diagram to separate the cluster members from the interlopers. We apply the
technique to mock catalogues containing 1000 galaxies in the field of view of
12 Mpc/h on a side at the cluster location. On average, this sample size
roughly corresponds to 180 real galaxy members within 3r200, similar to recent
redshift surveys of cluster regions. The caustic technique yields a
completeness, the fraction of identified true members, fc=0.95 (+- 0.03) within
3r200. The contamination increases from fi=0.020 (+0.046;-0.015) at r200 to
fi=0.08 (+0.11;-0.05) at 3r200. No other technique for the identification of
the members of a galaxy cluster provides such large completeness and small
contamination at these large radii. The caustic technique assumes spherical
symmetry and the asphericity of the cluster is responsible for most of the
spread of the completeness and the contamination. By applying the technique to
an approximately spherical system obtained by stacking the individual clusters,
the spreads decrease by at least a factor of two. We finally estimate the
cluster mass within 3r200 after removing the interlopers: for individual
clusters, the mass estimated with the virial theorem is unbiased and within 30
per cent of the actual mass; this spread decreases to less than 10 per cent for
the spherically symmetric stacked cluster.


Note: Describes how well cluster masses can be derived from optical measurements, useful to know as a comparison to X-ray approaches