2007/12/31 by Joo H. Yoon, Joo‐Heon Yoon, Kevin Schawinski +4 · 1 citation
Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Remote Sensing in Agriculture #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/528958
Web-page address has been revised and minor corrections are done
arxiv created 2008/03/17 · openalex publication_date 2008/05/28 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Recent large-scale galaxy spectroscopic surveys, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), enable us to execute a systematic, relatively unbiased search for galaxy clusters. Such surveys make it possible to measure the 3D distribution of galaxies but are hampered by the incompleteness problem due to fiber collisions. In this study we aim to develop a density-measuring technique that alleviates the problem and derives densities more accurately by adding additional cluster member galaxies that follow optical color-magnitude relations for the given redshift. The new density measured with both spectroscopic and photometric data shows a good agreement with apparent information on cluster images and is supported by follow-up observations. By adopting this new method, a total of 924 robust galaxy clusters are found from the SDSS DR5 database in the redshift range 0.05 < z < 0.1, of which 212 are new. Local maximum-density galaxies successfully represent cluster centers. We provide the cluster catalog including a number of cluster parameters.