Evolution of Cluster Alignments as Evidence of Large-scale Structure Formation in the Universe
: West, Michael J.; De Propris, Roberto; Einasto, Maret; Wen, Z. L.; Han, J. L.
Publisher: American Astronomical Society
: BRISTOL
: 2025
: Astrophysical Journal Letters
: The Astrophysical Journal Letters
: ASTROPHYS J LETT
: L24
: 987
: 2
: 10
: 2041-8205
: 2041-8213
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ade66d
: https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ade66d
: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/499433075
The Universe's large-scale structure forms a vast, interconnected network of filaments, sheets, and voids known as the cosmic web. For decades, astronomers have observed that the orientations of neighboring galaxy clusters within these elongated structures are often aligned over separations of tens of Mpc. Using the largest available catalog of galaxy clusters, we show for the first time that cluster orientations are correlated over even larger scales-up to 200-300 comoving Mpc-and such alignments are seen to redshifts of at least z similar or equal to 1. Comparison with numerical simulations suggests that coherent structures on similar scales may be expected in Lambda CDM models.
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We thank the anonymous referee and the statistics editor for helpful feedback that improved this Letter, and also Hans Bohringer and Gayoung Chon for helpful discussions. M.W. thanks the Finnish Centre for Astronomy with ESO (FINCA), the University of Turku, the US Fulbright program, and the Fulbright Finland Foundation for their support and hospitality during this research. M.E. acknowledges support by ETAG CoE grant "Foundations of the Universe" (TK202), by ETAG grant PRG2172, and the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation program (EXCOSM, grant No. 101159513). Z.L.W. and J.L.H. are supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant Nos. 11988101, 11833009, and 12073036), the Key Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant No. QYZDJ-SSW-SLH021), and also the science research grants from the China Manned Space Project with Numbers CMS-CSST-2021-A01 and CMS-CSST-2021-B01.
