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Session 87 - Large Scale Structure.
Display session, Friday, January 09
Exhibit Hall,
The results from the COBE satellite show the existence of structure in the cosmic microwave background radiation on scales \sim 10% or more of the horizon scale of the Universe. Rich clusters of galaxies from the Abell/ACO catalogs show evidence of structure on scales of 100h^-1Mpc and hold the promise of confirming structure on the scale of the COBE results. However, previous analyses for large-scale structure based on the clusters in these catalogs suffer from small sample sizes, imcomplete samples, and large uncertainties in the measured data. Our efforts with the MX Cluster Redshift Survey have resulted in galaxy redshifts for 95 rich Abell clusters returning 88 positive cluster identifications. Five cluster fields did not supply enough data for cluster positions and two clusters were found to be simply projections of galaxies strung out along the line of sight. By obtaining an average of 9 member galaxy redshifts per cluster, we have greatly reduced uncertainty in cluster locations. The Abell catalog is now 98% complete out to m_10 \le 16.8. This complete sample has provided us with the necessary data to calculate the two-point spatial correlation function, \xi(r), characterized by the slope of its power-law fit \gamma and a scale length r_o. Preliminary results give \gamma = -2.26\pm0.14 and r_o = 21.9\pm 1.5 h^-1Mpc. These results are then compared with other spatial analyses based on different samples.
