A NEW DYNAMICAL MASS MEASUREMENT for the VIRGO CLUSTER USING the RADIAL VELOCITY PROFILE of the FILAMENT GALAXIES

Abstract

The radial velocities of the galaxies in the vicinity of a cluster show deviation from the pure Hubble flow due to their gravitational interaction with the cluster. According to a recent study by Falco et al. based on a high-resolution N-body simulation, the radial velocity profile of galaxies located at distances larger than three times the virial radius of a neighboring cluster can be well approximated by a universal formula, and could be reconstructed from direct observables provided that the galaxies are distributed along a one-dimensional filament. They suggested an algorithm designed to estimate the dynamic mass of a cluster by fitting the universal formula from the simulation to the reconstructed radial velocity profile of the filament galaxies around the cluster from observations. We apply the algorithm to two narrow, straight filaments (referred to as Filaments A and B) that were recently identified by Kim et al. in the vicinity of the Virgo cluster from the NASA-Sloan-Atlas catalog. The dynamical mass of the Virgo cluster is estimated to be and for the cases of Filaments A and B, respectively. We discuss the observational and theoretical systematics intrinsic to the method of Falco et al. as well as the physical implication of the final results.