The Alignment of Clusters using Large Scale Simulations

Abstract

The alignment of clusters of galaxies with their nearest neighbours and between clusters within a supercluster is investigated using simulations of 512^{3} dark matter particles for \LambdaCDM and \tauCDM cosmological models. Strongly significant alignments are found for separations of up to 15h^{-1}Mpc in both cosmologies, but for the \LambdaCDM model the alignments extend up to separations of 30h^{-1}Mpc. The effect is strongest for nearest neighbours, but is not significant enough to be useful as an observational discriminant between cosmologies. As a check of whether this difference in alignments is present in other cosmologies, smaller simulations with 256^{3} particles are investigated for 4 different cosmological models. Because of poor number statistics, only the standard CDM model shows indications of having different alignments from the other models.