VizieR Online Data Catalog: 1959 massive galaxy clusters at high redshifts (Wen+, 2018)

The high-redshift massive clusters are identified from the WISE data and the SDSS data by following a few steps. The luminous red galaxies (LRGs) with spectroscopic redshifts in the SDSS are first taken as BCG candidates. The photometric data of the SDSS are used to discard stars and low-redshift galaxies in the WISE catalogue. Galaxy clusters are then recognized as the overdensity regions in the remaining WISE source catalogue around the LRGs. The SDSS performs the optical photometric survey and the follow-up spectroscopic survey in the northern sky (York et al. 2000AJ....120.1579Y). The photometric data have been taken at five broad-bands (u, g, r, i, and z covering 14000deg² of the sky (Aihara et al. 2011ApJS..193...29A) reaching a limit of r=22.2mag (Stoughton et al. 2002AJ....123..485S). Among 278 million sources from the photometric data, 112 million sources have been classified as stars, and other 166 million sources are classified as galaxies. The WISE survey observes the whole sky in four mid-infrared bands (Wright et al. 2010AJ....140.1868W): W1 (3.4μm), W2 (4.6μm), W3 (12μm), and W4 (22μm) with 5σ magnitude limits of 17.1, 15.7, 11.5, and 7.7mag in the Vega system for point sources, respectively. For high-redshift galaxies, the W1-band photometric data of WISE are deeper than the SDSS data due to the slow change of galaxy magnitude with redshift (Yan et al. 2013AJ....145...16L, Cat. J/AJ/145/16). We therefore identify high-redshift clusters from the WISE source catalogue, after foreground objects are discarded by using the SDSS photometric data.

(2 data files).