Orientation of galaxies in galaxy clusters

2012

We present an analysis of the spatial orientations of galaxies in 247 optically selected rich Abell clusters which have at least 100 members in the considered area. We investigated the relation between angles that give information about galaxy angular momenta and the number of members in each structure. The position angles of the galaxies' major axes, as well as two angles describing the spatial orientation of the galaxy plane, were tested for isotropy by applying three different statistical tests. It is found that the values of the statistics increase with the amount of the galaxies' members, which is equivalent to the existence of a relation between anisotropy and the number of galaxies i…