The WARPS survey: III. The discovery of an X-ray luminous galaxy cluster at z=0.833 and the impact of X-ray substructure on cluster abundance measurements

Abstract

The WARPS team reviews the properties and history of discovery of ClJ0152.7-1357, an X-ray luminous, rich cluster of galaxies at z=0.833. At L_X = 8 x 10^44 h^(-2) erg/s (0.5-2.0 keV) ClJ0152.7-1357 is the most X-ray luminous cluster known at redshifts z>0.55. The high X-ray luminosity of the system suggests that massive clusters may begin to form at redshifts considerably greater than unity. This scenario is supported by the high degree of optical and X-ray substructure in ClJ0152.7-1357, which is similarly complex as that of other X-ray selected distant clusters and consistent with the picture of cluster formation by mass infall along large-scale filaments. X-ray emission from ClJ0152.7-1357 was detected already in 1980 with the EINSTEIN IPC. However, because the complex morphology of the emission caused its significance to be underestimated, the corresponding source was not included in the EMSS cluster sample and hence not previously identified. Simulations of the EMSS source detection and selection procedure suggest a general bias of the EMSS against X-ray luminous clusters with pronounced substructure. If highly unrelaxed, merging clusters are common at high redshift, they could create a bias in some samples as the morphological complexity of mergers may cause them to fall below the flux limit of surveys that assume a unimodal spatial source geometry. Conversely, the enhanced X-ray luminosity of mergers might cause them to, temporarily, rise above the flux limit. Either effect could lead to erroneous conclusions about the evolution of the comoving cluster space density. A high fraction of morphologically complex clusters at high redshift would also call into question the validity of cosmological studies that assume that the systems under investigation are virialized.