A New Method for Finding Clusters of Galaxies at z>1

Abstract

At large redshifts, a cluster or group may be too distant for the galaxies within the cluster to be detected individually. However, the light from these ``undetected'' galaxies still modulates the surface brightness of the background sky. Clusters can appear as 10"-1.5' sized fluctuations in the surface brightness of the EBL. The fluctuations have central surface brightnesses between roughly 26 and 28 mag/sqr-arcsec (in V) for clusters between z=1 and z=2, and are brighter than the fluctuations produced by background field galaxies. While such low surface brightnesses are difficult to achieve with direct high-resolution imaging, we demonstrate that they are easily reached in short exposures through smoothing the sky in very flat CCD images. For a reasonable extrapolation of the properties and space densities of clusters and groups, we find that for a wide range of cosmological assumptions there should be tens of clusters per square degree visible in the extragalactic background. The detection rate can range between 0.1 and 100 clusters per square degree, for extreme assumptions about the rate of cluster and galaxy evolution. Drift scans provide sufficient accuracy of flat-fielding to make the method discussed in this paper an efficient techinque for finding candidate high redshift clusters.