FENG DONG, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

PRINCETON ASTRONOMY COLLOQUIUM - MAY 10, 2005

ABSTRACT

Clusters of Galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

One of the key science goals of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has been to create new catalogs of galaxy clusters from the multi-color photometric and spectroscopic data. Here we present a new automated Matched-Filter cluster-finding algorithm which is fully adaptive to 2-D, 2.5-D and 3-D data in current large optical surveys. The algorithm was tested using mock SDSS galaxy catalogs constructed from LCDM Hubble Volume simulations and then applied to ~5000 deg^2 of the SDSS DR3 data. The present catalog includes ~18,000 clusters of galaxies in the redshift range of z = 0.05 - 0.5, and will represent one of the largest and most homogeneous samples of galaxy clusters in the local and intermediate redshift range. The catalog can be used for characterization and studies of clusters both as physical systems and cosmological probes. Some of these works are under way.