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Current wisdom suggests that X-ray substructure in the intracluster medium (ICM) is fairly common in galaxy clusters. This substructure takes the form of elongations, isophotal twisting, asymmetries, and subclumping. Substructure is also frequently present in kinematical analysis of the galaxy velocity and spatial distributions. These features include bimodality, kurtosis or skewness, and non-Gaussian velocity distributions. Consistent with the observations, Hydro/N-Body simulations suggest that cluster-subcluster mergers may be the culprit to explain these features in the ICM gas distribution, and would indicate that many clusters, even at the present epoch, are still undergoing significant dynamical evolution.
From a sample of X-ray images from the Einstein satellite and, more recently, the ROSAT mission, Burns \etal\ (1994) found a significant correlation between the positions of radio galaxies and subclumps within the cluster-scale X-ray emission. Burns \etal\ have suggested that radio galaxies reside in the residue of cluster/sub-cluster merging sites, and may therefore act as pointers to clusters with ongoing and intersting dynamical activity. We are following up these ideas with a detailed substructure analysis, and a comparison to a sample of clusters without radio galaxies.
In order to determine the signficance of substructure, we have reanalyzed the X-ray images using a Bootstrap-Resampling Monte-Carlo technique. In this method, asymmetries, elongations, and other forms of substructure are evaluated using a moment-analysis similar to M{\"o}hr \etal\ (1994), with the advantage that we need not assume apriori any specific substructure-free model for the source (\ie\ a Beta-model). The significance of individual features is determined solely from a comparison to statistical fluctuations (including noise) of the actual data. Using this technique, we place limits on the fraction of clusters with significant substructure and test the radio galaxy/substructure correlations from our radio-loud and quiet samples.
