Identification and study of systems of galaxies in the Shapley supercluster

¹ Grupo de Investigaciones en Astronomía Teórica y Experimental, IATE, Observatorio Astronómico, Laprida 854, Córdoba, Argentina
² Consejo de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas de la República Argentina e-mail: [cin;hernan]@oac.uncor.edu
³ GEPI, Observatoire de Paris-Meudon, 92195 Meudon Cedex, France e-mail: Dominique.Proust@obspm.fr
⁴ Departamento de Astronomía y Astrofísica, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Casilla 306, Santiago 22, Chile e-mail: [areisene;hquintana]@astro.puc.cl

Received: 13 June 2005
Accepted: 7 September 2005

Abstract

Based on the largest compilation of galaxies with redshift in the region of the Shapley Supercluster (Proust et al. 2004, P2004), we identified 122 galaxy systems, 60 of which are new systems. Using the SuperCOSMOS catalogue, we have assigned b_j magnitudes to each galaxy in our compilation. The sample of galaxy systems was used to estimate the mass function of systems in the range 10¹³ to 10¹⁵ . We computed a lower value to the total mass in the region of the Shapley Supercluster with this mass function. Using 15 mock catalogues we derived the mean mass that these kinds of systems have before comparing it with that obtained from the real data.