2008/06/04 by R. Fassbender, Fassbender, Rene
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0806.0861
Investigating X-ray luminous galaxy clusters at z>~1 provides a fundamental constraint on evolutionary studies of the largest virialized structures in the Universe, the baryonic matter in form of the hot ICM, their galaxy populations, and the effects of Dark Energy. The main aim of this work is to establish the observational foundation for the XMM-Newton Distant Cluster Project (XDCP). This new serendipitous survey is focused on the most distant systems at z>1, based on the selection of extended X-ray sources, their identification as clusters via two-band imaging, and their final spectroscopic confirmation. Almost 1000 extended sources were selected as cluster candidates from the analysis of 80 deg2 of deep XMM-Newton archival data, of which 75% could be readily identified as systems at z~0.9. The new Z-H method has allowed a cluster sample study over an unprecedented redshift baseline of 0.2