Massive Cooling Flow Clusters Inhabit Crowded Environments

Abstract

With the availability of large-scale redshift survey data, it is now becoming possible to explore correlations between large-scale structure and the properties and morphologies of galaxy clusters. We investigate the spatial distributions of a 98% complete, volume-limited sample of nearby (z<0.1) Abell clusters with well-determined redshifts and find that cooling flow clusters with high mass-accretion rates have nearest neighbors which are much closer than those of other clusters in the sample (at the 99.8% confidence level), and reside in more crowded environments out to 30/h Mpc. Several possible explanations of this effect are discussed.