The Massive Distant Clusters of WISE Survey: The First Distant Galaxy Cluster Discovered by WISE

TL;DR

This paper reports the spectroscopic confirmation of a distant galaxy cluster at z=0.99 discovered using WISE data, marking the first such confirmation from the MaDCoWS survey and demonstrating WISE's potential for identifying high-redshift clusters.

Contribution

First spectroscopic confirmation of a z~1 galaxy cluster from the MaDCoWS WISE survey, validating the survey's method for finding distant galaxy clusters.

Findings

Confirmed a galaxy cluster at z=0.99 with Keck spectroscopy.

Demonstrated WISE's effectiveness in identifying high-redshift clusters.

Established a foundation for a large, uniformly-selected sample of distant clusters.

Abstract

We present spectroscopic confirmation of a z=0.99 galaxy cluster discovered using data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). This is the first z~1 cluster candidate from the Massive Distant Clusters of WISE Survey (MaDCoWS) to be confirmed. It was selected as an overdensity of probable z>~1 sources using a combination of WISE and SDSS-DR8 photometric catalogs. Deeper follow-up imaging data from Subaru and WIYN reveal the cluster to be a rich system of galaxies, and multi-object spectroscopic observations from Keck confirm five cluster members at z=0.99. The detection and confirmation of this cluster represents a first step towards constructing a uniformly-selected sample of distant, high-mass galaxy clusters over the full extragalactic sky using WISE data.