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Description
In this paper we consider a large sample of optically selected clusters, in order to elucidate the physical reasons for the existence of X-ray underluminous clusters. For this purpose we analyzed the correlations of the X-ray and optical properties of a sample of 137 spectroscopically confirmed Abell clusters in the SDSS database. We searched for the X-ray counterpart of each cluster in the ROSAT All Sky Survey. We find that 40% of our clusters have a marginal X-ray detection or remain undetected in X-rays. These clusters appear too X-ray faint on average for their mass as determined by velocity dispersion; i.e. they do not follow the scaling relation between X-ray luminosity and virial mass traced by the other clusters. On the other hand, they do follow the general scaling relation between optical luminosity and virial mass. We refer to these clusters as the X-ray-underluminous Abell clusters (AXU clusters, for short) and designate as "normal" the X-ray detected Abell systems. We separately examined the distributions and properties of the galaxy populations of the normal and the AXU clusters.
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