Abstract
We present two new catalogues of superclusters of galaxies within a redshift of z=0.15, constructed using the Abell/ACO cluster redshift compilation by one of us (H.A.). One is the all-sky Main SuperCluster Catalogue (MSCC), based on 3410 A-clusters (92% with spectroscopic redshifts), containing 601 superclusters with multiplicities from 2 to 42; the other is the Southern (δ <-17°) SuperCluster Catalogue (SSCC) based on 1227 A-clusters and 1177 S-clusters (90% with spectroscopic redshifts), containing 425 superclusters with multiplicities from 2 to 39. These are currently the deepest all-sky supercluster catalogues based on optical data. By comparing both catalogues, we found the following effects (expressed as percentages of the total number of superclusters in SSCC): new superclusters with S-clusters around A-cluster cores (12.6%), the formation of bridges of S-clusters between A-clusters (1.2%), and the addition of new superclusters formed by S-clusters only (25.4%). We determined morphological parameters for the superclusters, based on ellipsoid fits and Minkowski functionals, obtaining that 39% of the rich (multiplicity >5) superclusters are prolate ellipsoids and 61% are oblate ones. The cumulative multiplicity functions of both catalogues follow very closely a power law with an exponent of -2.0 for MSCC and -1.9 for SSCC. This power law is clearly inconsistent with the same function we derived for supercluster catalogues based on simulated samples of randomly distributed clusters. It is also inconsistent, though less significantly, with similar analyses we applied to the Bolshoi cosmological simulation of the evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe.
