The Massive and Distant Clusters of WISE Survey. I. Survey Overview and a Catalog of >2000 Galaxy Clusters at z ≃ 1

Creators: Gonzalez, Anthony H.; Masci, Frank J.

Abstract

We present the Massive and Distant Clusters of WISE Survey (MaDCoWS), a search for galaxy clusters at 0.7 ≾ z ≾ 1.5 based upon data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. MaDCoWS is the first cluster survey capable of discovering massive clusters at these redshifts over the full extragalactic sky. The search is divided into two regions—the region of the extragalactic sky covered by Pan-STARRS (δ > −30°) and the remainder of the southern extragalactic sky at δ < −30° for which shallower optical data from the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey is available. In this paper, we describe the search algorithm, characterize the sample, and present the first MaDCoWS data release—catalogs of the 2433 highest amplitude detections in the WISE–Pan-STARRS region and the 250 highest amplitude detections in the WISE–SuperCOSMOS region. A total of 1723 of the detections from the WISE–Pan-STARRS sample have also been observed with the Spitzer Space Telescope, providing photometric redshifts and richnesses, and an additional 64 detections within the WISE–SuperCOSMOS region also have photometric redshifts and richnesses. Spectroscopic redshifts for 38 MaDCoWS clusters with IRAC photometry demonstrate that the photometric redshifts have an uncertainty of σ_z /(1 + z) 0.036. Combining the richness measurements with Sunyaev–Zel'dovich observations of MaDCoWS clusters, we also present a preliminary mass–richness relation that can be used to infer the approximate mass distribution of the full sample. The estimated median mass for the WISE–Pan-STARRS catalog is M_(500) = 1.6^(+0.7)_(-0.8) x 10^(14) M_⊙, with the Sunyaev–Zel'dovich data confirming that we detect clusters with masses up to M_(500) ~ 5 × 10^(14) M_⊙ (M_(200) ~ 10^(15) M_⊙).

Additional Information

© 2019 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2018 September 17; revised 2018 December 10; accepted 2018 December 17; published 2019 February 7. The authors thank Alex Merson and Marc Postman for valuable discussions that facilitated the completion of this project, and the anonymous referee for suggestions that improved this paper. Funding for this program is provided by NASA through the NASA Astrophysical Data Analysis Program, award NNX12AE15G. Parts of this work have also been supported through NASA grants associated with the Spitzer observations (PID 90177 and PID 11080) and with Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations (HST-GO-14456), and by two NASA Keck PI Data Awards, administered by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. This publication makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This work is also based in part on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. The Millennium Simulation databases used in this paper and the web application providing online access to them were constructed as part of the activities of the German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory. The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) have been made possible through contributions of the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, Queen's University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation under grant No. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, and Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). The SZ results presented in this paper are based upon data from the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy. Support for CARMA construction was derived from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation; the James S. McDonnell Foundation; the Associates of the California Institute of Technology; the University of Chicago; the states of California, Illinois, and Maryland; and the National Science Foundation. Ongoing CARMA development and operations are supported by the National Science Foundation under a cooperative agreement and by the CARMA partner universities. The spectroscopic results presented in this paper are based upon observations with the Gran Telescopio Canarias, Gemini Observatory, and the W. M. Keck Observatory. This program included observations taken with the Gran Telescopio Canarias, Gemini Observatory, the W. M. Keck Observatory, and Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy. Data from the GTC, located at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, were obtained through time allocated by the University of Florida. Gemini Observatory is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under a cooperative agreement with the NSF on behalf of the Gemini partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), the National Research Council (Canada), CONICYT (Chile), Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva (Argentina), and Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação (Brazil). Data from the W. M. Keck Observatory were obtained via time from telescope time allocated to the National Aeronautic and Space Administration through the agency's scientific partnership with the California Institute of Technology and the University of California. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W.M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. This research uses Dark Energy Survey (DES) data provided by the NOAO Data Lab. NOAO is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc., under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Cambridge, Centro de Investigaciones Enérgeticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas-Madrid, the University of Chicago, University College London, the DES-Brazil Consortium, the University of Edinburgh, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institut de Ciències de l'Espai (IEEC/CSIC), the Institut de Física d'Altes Energies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the University of Nottingham, The Ohio State University, the OzDES Membership Consortium, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Sussex, and Texas A&M University. Based in part on observations at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.

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