Searching for Clusters with SUMSS.pdfVIP

Searching for Clusters with SUMSS Helen J. Buttery aGarret Cotter a Richard W. Hunstead b Elaine M. Sadler b a Astrophysics Group, Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge 3 0 b School of Physics, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia 0 2 b e Abstract F 9 1 Statistical overdensities of radiosources in the Sydney University Molonglo Sky Survey (SUMSS) are used as signposts to identify high-redshift clusters of galaxies. 1 These potential clusters have been observed at 20 and 13 cm at the Australia Tele- v 0 scope Compact Array (ATCA) to obtain better positional accuracy for the sources. 9 A subsample have been imaged in V , R and I at the 2.3-m telescope at Siding 3 Spring and in J and K at the Anglo Australian Telescope (AAT) and the New 2 0 Technology Telescope (NTT) at La Silla, Chile. The colours obtained from these 3 observations will be used to estimate redshifts for the potential cluster members. 0 / h p Key words: galaxies: clusters - o r t s a : v i 1 Introduction X r a Evidence is growing for a ΩΛ ∼ 0.7, ΩM ∼ 0.3 universe (see eg. (1) (2)). Struc- ture formation theory predicts that such a universe will contain large numbers of clusters out to z ≈ 1 (3). However, only a handful of such clusters have been discovered to date (see eg. (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10), (11), (12), (13)); the traditional methods for finding clusters, using overdensities of optical or IR sources, suffer severely from contrast and contamination problems at high redshifts. For