GalWeight: A New and Effective Weighting Technique for Determining Galaxy Cluster and Group Membership

We introduce GalWeight, a new technique for assigning galaxy cluster membership. This technique is specifically designed to simultaneously maximize the number of bona fide cluster members while minimizing the number of contaminating interlopers. The GalWeight technique can be applied to both massive galaxy clusters and poor galaxy groups. Moreover, it is effective in identifying members in both the virial and infall regions with high efficiency. We apply the GalWeight technique to MDPL2 and Bolshoi N-body simulations, and find that it is >98% accurate in correctly assigning cluster membership. We show that GalWeight compares very favorably against four well-known existing cluster membership techniques (shifting gapper, den Hartog, caustic, SIM). We also apply the GalWeight technique to a sample of 12 Abell clusters (including the Coma cluster) using observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We conclude by discussing GalWeight’s potential for other astrophysical applications.