Correlations in the orientations of galaxy clusters

¹ Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam, An der Sternwarte 16, 14482 Potsdam, Germany
² Sektion Physik, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Theresienstraße 37, 80333 München, Germany

Corresponding author: A. Faltenbacher, afaltenbacher@aip.de

Received: 29 May 2002
Accepted: 28 August 2002

Abstract

The relative orientation of clusters' major elongation axes and clusters' angular momenta is studied using a large N-body simulation in a box of 500 h^-1 Mpc base length for a standard ΛCDM model. Employing the technique of mark correlation functions, we successfully separated the correlations in the orientation from the well known clustering signal traced by the two-point correlation function. The correlations in the orientation are highly significant for our sample of 3000 clusters. We found an alignment of neighboring clusters, i.e. an enhanced probability of the major elongation axes of neighboring cluster pairs to be in parallel with each other. At 10 h^-1 Mpc separation the amplitude of this signal is ~ above the value expected from random orientations, and it vanishes on scales larger than 15 h^-1 Mpc. The “filamentary” alignment between clusters' major elongation axes and the lines pointing towards neighboring clusters shows even stronger deviations from random orientation, which can be detected out to scales of 100 h^-1 Mpc, both in 2D and 3D analyses. Similarly, strong correlations of the angular momentum were seen. Also a clear signal in the scalar correlation of the absolute value of the angular momentum, the spin parameter and the mass was found. They extend up to 50 h^-1 Mpc and have an amplitude of 40%, 15%, and 10% above a random distribution at 10 h^-1 Mpc separation, respectively.