Finding lists of candidate superclusters and voids of Abell clusters
David J. Batuski, Jack O. Burns · The Astronomical Journal · 1985
Rich clusters of galaxies, like those in Abell's (1958) catalog, may be good tracers of the large-scale structure in the universe. A finding list of 102 candidate superclusters has been assembled by examining the distribution of 652 Abell clusters with measured or estimated redshifts less than 0.13 and a list of 29 regions with redshifts of less than about 0.1 that appear totally devoid of such clusters. The supercluster list was constructed using a percolation technique, wherein clusters with separations of less than 40 Mpc/hr (75 km/s/Mpc) were linked together to form the supercluster candidates. This list includes a rough estimate of the probability of membership of each cluster in a given candidate supercluster. Four high-probability supercluster candidates have been examined in detail, using projected 3-D plots. These candidates have distinctly nonspherical structures on the order of 100-200 Mpc/hr. The candidate voids likewise have dimensions of 100-200 Mpc/hr, but they appear to be more spherical. A comparison of the distribution of Abell clusters with a Monte Carlo random distribution constrained by the two-point spatial correlation function of the Abell clusters suggests that significantly more large-scale structure is present than expected from the two-point correlations.