The extended ROSAT-ESO Flux Limited X-ray Galaxy Cluster Survey (REFLEX II) III. Construction of the first flux-limited supercluster sample

TL;DR

This paper constructs a flux-limited supercluster catalogue from the REFLEX II X-ray galaxy cluster survey, analyzing supercluster properties and comparing luminosity functions in different environments.

Contribution

It presents the first supercluster catalogue based on REFLEX II data and explores supercluster characteristics and luminosity function variations.

Findings

164 superclusters identified at z<=0.4

Supercluster properties vary with parameters

X-ray luminosity function mildly top-heavy in dense regions

Abstract

We present the first supercluster catalogue constructed with the extended ROSAT-ESO Flux Limited X-ray Galaxy Cluster survey (REFLEX II) data, which comprises 919 X-ray selected galaxy clusters. Based on this cluster catalogue we construct a supercluster catalogue using a friends-of-friends algorithm with a linking length depending on the local cluster density. The resulting catalogue comprises 164 superclusters at redshift z<=0.4. We study the properties of different catalogues such as the distributions of the redshift, extent and multiplicity by varying the choice of parameters. In addition to the main catalogue we compile a large volume-limited cluster sample to investigate the statistics of the superclusters. We also compare the X-ray luminosity function for the clusters in superclusters with that for the field clusters with the flux- and volume-limited catalogues. The results mildly support the theoretical suggestion of a top-heavy X-ray luminosity function of galaxy clusters in regions of high cluster density.